You can restore excluded transactions in QuickBooks Online because excluding never deletes a line. Open Bank transactions, pick the account, go to the Excluded tab, tick the lines you want back and select Undo. They return to the review tab, where you add or match each one to the right account as if it had just arrived.
Where do excluded transactions go in QuickBooks Online?
Excluded transactions stay on the Excluded tab of the Bank transactions page for the account they came into. They are kept, not erased. While they sit there they count nowhere: no register, no report and no reconciliation sees them, so restoring one is the only way to make it count.
Intuit's help article on excluding a downloaded transaction says an excluded line does not appear in any account history or financial report. That is why the same article warns against excluding personal spending paid from a business account. Those lines are real money leaving the account, so it suggests recording them, for example to an owner's draw account, instead of hiding them.
Every bank and card account has its own Excluded tab. If you cannot find a line, check that you opened the tile for the account it was downloaded or uploaded into. A file sent to the wrong account leaves its excluded lines under that wrong tile.
Restoring excluded transactions with Undo on the Excluded tab
Restoring takes four clicks per batch, and you can restore many lines at once. Each restored line goes back to the review tab exactly as it was downloaded or uploaded, with its original date, description and amount, ready to be accepted again.
- Go to Bank transactions and select the tile for the right account.
- Open the Excluded tab.
- Tick the checkbox next to each line you want back.
- Select Undo.
Intuit's article says the restored lines return to the For review tab. Newer screens label the review tab Pending, so look for either name. Sort the Excluded tab by date before you tick, which makes it easy to restore a run of days without picking up a line from a different week.
Recording a restored bank line in the right account
A restored line has no category yet. You decide again whether to add it as a new record, match it to an entry already in your books, or transfer it to another account. Treat it as a fresh download and check that a matching entry does not already exist.
Matching matters most for restored lines. Someone excluded the line for a reason, and often that reason was that the payment was already entered by hand. Before you add a restored deposit, search the register for the same amount near the same date. If you find it, match the line to it instead of adding it, or the deposit will count twice.
Sometimes the reason for the exclusion was that the line sat under the wrong account tile. Restoring it there does not help. The post on transactions imported to the wrong account in QuickBooks covers moving lines to the account where they belong.
A short checklist before restoring
- Is the line a real movement on the bank statement for that date?
- Is there no entry for the same amount and date in the register already?
- Is it under the tile for the account the statement belongs to?
- Is the period it falls in still open, not reconciled and closed?
If the answer to all four is yes, restore it. If any answer is no, fix that first.
Can an excluded transaction be restored after it was deleted?
Not from the bank transactions screens. Undo only reaches lines still on the Excluded tab. Once a line is deleted from there, it is gone from that list, and the way back depends on where the line came from: a bank feed or a file you uploaded.
For a feed line, the bank may send it again. Intuit's article on fixing duplicate bank feed transactions says that when a downloaded transaction is deleted rather than excluded, QuickBooks downloads it again from the bank. For a line from an uploaded CSV or QBO file, nothing will resend it. Upload a small file with just that line, or enter it by hand.
The same article notes that deleted register transactions cannot be restored, though the audit log keeps their details for about two years. The audit log is a place to read what was there, not a restore button. If an upload of the missing line fails, the post on QuickBooks Online bank upload errors helps you find out why.
Excluded duplicates that should stay excluded
Some excluded lines are exactly where they belong. A line that duplicates a payment already in your books should stay excluded, because restoring it would bring the duplicate back. This is the most common case after a file upload overlaps the bank feed or an earlier file.
Intuit's duplicates article recommends excluding the extra copy when one of two identical lines is already matched or added. If you restore a whole day of excluded lines to recover one real payment, you will often pull back that day's duplicates too. Restore the single line you need, then review the rest where they are.
When an entire upload went in twice, the Excluded tab may hold dozens of these copies. The guide to QuickBooks Online duplicate transactions after an upload explains how to tell the copies from the originals before you decide what to restore.