When Tech Fails: How to Troubleshoot Bookkeeping Software Issues

Technology is amazing until it isn’t.

The Roomba that spreads dog poop all over the house.

The cell phone that pocket dials your ex.

The autocorrect that makes your convo with your mother-in-law super awkward.

But on the whole, technology has improved our lives immensely.

When it comes to your business the technology options are endless.

Email service providers, funnels, ads, schedulers, bookkeeping software...all tech options to make our lives more convenient.

So how do you troubleshoot when something goes wrong?

Here are a few things that can go wrong when you download your transactions into your bookkeeping software and how you can fix them.

Ah, my Facebook ads for the month, that goes to advertising...but wait, didn’t I just categorize that one yesterday?

Yep. Totally happens.

Duplicating of transactions usually happens when a transaction is brought into the software while your bank considers it to be pending, and then it gets brought in again after it clears.

How to identify duplicate transactions: download a list of all of the transactions from your software, if it’s obvious which ones are duplicates then you know which ones to go delete.

But I’ve seen where it’s not so obvious.

Sometimes the transactions have totally different descriptions.

Consider keeping the transaction that has the most descriptive data. If it’s really difficult to figure out which to keep and which to delete consider downloading the transactions from your bank or comparing the list to your bank statement.

This path takes more time but it’s the most thorough.

Occasionally your bookkeeping software and your bank may lose connection.

Password changes, going too long between downloading transactions, any number of things can cause missing data.

Make sure you hop into your software weekly to confirm that your transactions are downloading properly.

This has an added benefit in that you know exactly how your business is doing in real time, and I’m all about that.

Unfortunately, it can be difficult to catch missing data.

The best way to catch it is to do your monthly bank account reconciliation. This is where you compare you month-end bank balance per your statement to the month end balance in your software.

Most software makes this process super simple, so it’s practically painless. When it doesn’t agree you know that you’ve got some investigation to do. 

How to identify the missing transactions: again the best method is to download the transactions from your bank and compare it to the transactions in your software.

Once you figure out what’s missing you can easily manually add the item and categorize it as normal.

Technology can do some crazy things.

I’ve seen a software bring cash in and cash out transactions all as cash in. Crazy town! Took me a bit to figure out what was going on.

I probably can’t even list all of the ways transactions could be downloaded incorrectly.

How to identify the incorrect transactions: No surprise here, you’re going to have to compare your software transactions to the bank transactions and find the problem children.

In some software, you won’t actually be able to edit the value of the transaction, in that case, your best option is to delete the transactions and upload the correct ones.

While several things can go wrong when you download transactions from your bank account to your bookkeeping software, overall the technology makes everything so much easier.

And I’m on board for anything that makes the complicated world of entrepreneurship a little bit simpler

Have no desire to sort out your own software issues? I can totally help.

In the words of one of my favorite clients: “Every time I look at it, I want to cry. I'd rather be writing :)”

And I’d rather be troubleshooting your bookkeeping issues!

Send me an email and we can talk about all the ways we can work together to get your software woes figured out.