Bookkeeping QuickBooks Cleanup Help Money that is not a sale
A deposit is a line on a statement. It becomes a sale only when a customer actually bought something. The other deposits need their own names.
Three deposits that are not sales
The owner moves personal money into the shop account so payroll can clear. That is the owner, not a customer. A vendor sends money back because an invoice was wrong. That is a refund, and it belongs against the expense or the bill, not on the income line. Money moves from a savings account the owner already holds into the operating account. That is a transfer between the owner's own accounts. None of the three is a sale, and all three can land in the income column if nobody is watching.
The feed will often suggest a category from the last time a similar amount arrived. Similar is not the same. A repeated amount can be rent coming back, or it can be the owner moving the same sum every Friday. We ask what the line was. The memo on the bank side is a hint. It is not a verdict.
How a sale gets proven
A sale has a customer, a date, and something that was delivered or invoiced. If those three exist, the deposit can be matched to them. If they do not, the deposit stays unnamed until they do. We would rather leave a line uncategorized for a week than call it income because the total looked thin.
Sales tax collected, if your state charges it, sits with the sale and leaves when it is paid over. That amount is not extra income, and not a tip for the shop. The pages here do not pick a state rate. The matching habit does not change from one state to the next. Match the deposit. Do not invent a customer.
Owner money has its own lane
Money the owner puts in and money the owner takes out are not the profit of the month. They change what the owner is owed, or what the owner owes. Mixing them into income and expense is how a shop looks rich in a month when the owner was simply moving cash, and how it looks poor in a month when the owner paid a personal bill from the wrong account.
On the call, name one deposit you do not trust. That single line is enough to show the habit. We do not need the whole year of deposits in the form.
Name that deposit.
Describe one deposit in plain words. No account numbers.
You will be talking to the Steven Palmieri practice.