Credit card purchases imported as payments

Why it happens

Card issuers do not agree on signs. Some export a purchase as 42.50 because it adds to what you owe; others export -42.50 because it is money leaving you. QuickBooks has its own convention, and when the two disagree every purchase arrives as a payment or deposit, and every payment as a charge.

The other cause is the destination. If the file goes into a bank account instead of a credit card account, QuickBooks reads the amounts from the wrong side of the ledger.

Check two things first

1. The account. Upload the file to a Credit Card account in QuickBooks, not a Checking or Savings account. Create the credit card account first if you need to.
2. The signs in your file. Open the export and find one purchase and one payment you remember. Note which one is negative.

Test with two rows before uploading months

Sources disagree on which sign QuickBooks Online expects in a credit card CSV, so test your own setup. These files contain one $12.34 purchase and one $50.00 payment, both labelled SIGN TEST:

• card-sign-test.csv: one Amount column, purchase negative (-12.34), payment positive (50.00).
• card-sign-test-two-columns.csv: separate Charge and Payment columns, both positive.

1. Upload the file to your credit card account (Link account menu › Upload from file) and map the columns.
2. Under For review, look at where SIGN TEST PURCHASE lands. A purchase should increase what you owe, shown as spent or a charge.
3. If it lands as received or a payment, your real file needs the opposite signs from this test file.
4. Exclude both SIGN TEST rows, then delete them from the Excluded tab, so they never reach your books.

Fix the signs before importing

• QBO (Web Connect) file. Purchases must be negative and payments positive. In the CSV to QBO converter, choose Credit card as the account type. If the preview shows purchases as positive, turn on Invert signs and check the preview again before downloading.
• CSV upload to QuickBooks Online. Advice on which sign QuickBooks expects differs between sources, and it also depends on whether you choose one or two amount columns. Test before uploading months of data: upload a file with two or three rows, including one purchase and one payment, and see whether they appear under Spent and Received the way you expect. If they are reversed, flip every amount in the file and try again.
• Separate charge and payment columns. Use the two-column layout and map Charges to the debit side and Payments to the credit side. Then no signs need changing.

QuickBooks Desktop users importing an IIF file face the same question. The CSV to IIF converter shows each row as a charge or credit before you download.

Clean up a batch that came in reversed

1. If the transactions are still under For review, select them all and exclude them. Excluded transactions do not reach your books, and you can delete them from the Excluded tab.
2. If you already added or matched some, undo those from the Categorized (or Reviewed) tab first, then exclude them.
3. Fix the signs and upload the corrected file. Excluding the old batch first stops the two versions from being matched against each other.
4. Reconcile the card account against the statement balance to confirm the totals.

Menu labels vary between QuickBooks versions. Intuit’s guide to excluding and fixing duplicate bank transactions covers the same screens.