If your QuickBooks file spans several years, you may want to clean up your Chart of Accounts going back to the beginning of the last fiscal year. As explained on page 12, you should create Profit and Loss and Balance Sheet reports for this year and last year, and compare the accounts that appear on these reports with the accounts that appear on your Chart of Accounts.

If you date the reports from the beginning to the end of the last fiscal year, and from the beginning of this year to the current date (type "T" for Today in the "To" field of the date field on the report), and then find you cannot delete an account that does not appear on one of the reports, it is probably because the account was used in an earlier date range. The account has not been used for over a year, and therefore you might want to remove it from your Chart of Accounts by making it inactive.

By only showing accounts on your Chart of Accounts that have been active from the beginning of the last fiscal year onwards, you can reduce the number of accounts that are visible. Because you have fewer accounts to deal with, your data entry is easier and more accurate.

If we create a QuickReport for "Auto: Lease:Van" we see that the account could not be deleted because it has transactions in it from 1995. The lease is paid up and the account is no longer active. We should therefore make the account "Auto:Lease:Van" inactive.

Procedure:

1) Click on the account "Auto: Lease: Van" to highlight it.

2) Click on the "Account" button to open the drop-down list.

3) Click on "Make Inactive".

4) Now the account "Auto:Lease:Van" no longer appears on your Chart of Accounts.

Because the account "Auto:Lease: Van" is now inactive, you should merge the subaccount "Car" into the subaccount "Lease" and rename the account "Lease on Car" so that your reports do not show a "parent" account with only one sub-account. This also prevents mistakes like "Lease - Other" appearing on reports as explained on page 14.