How To Void a Check in QuickBooks Desktop

hi this is tim yoder with fit small business today i'm going to teach you how to void a check in quickbooks desktop i'll be using quickbooks premiere but the process is the same in quickbooks pro and quickbooks enterprise so so we'll talk about two types of checks first let's talk about how to avoid a regular check like you would use to either pay a bill or to pay an expense directly and then we'll talk about how to avoid paychecks which are a little bit more complicated so let's look at regular checks first so from our dashboard in quickbooks desktop let's go to our check register and find the check that we want to void okay so let's pick one that's already been printed here and we want a regular one how about the account here okay so i'm gonna make some notes so we can find this bill so notice this is a bill payment so this is not an expense that was paid immediately with a check this is one where we received a bill from the vendor entered the bill and then later paid the bill so we are going to void the check that paid that bill so this is to oliveri for 563 dollars on december 10th okay so to avoid it first let's open it so we can just double click anywhere on that line and here we have the check to the accountants now notice there is another bill outstanding on 114 but this is paying the bill on 12 15. so to avoid it very simple we just go up here to instead of delete we want to click the down arrow and we want to go to void okay and it turned the amount to zero and we can now save and close okay get a little warning here um about avoiding a check so this was used to pay a bill and so it's basically telling us that now the bill is going to be open again so let's hit save and there we go so in our check register we can see check 2345 has been voided and so there's zero amount okay so that's voiding the check but i'm going to assume when you avoid a check you're generally going to want to reissue the check as well perhaps it was just like a stop payment but generally when you want to avoid a check it got destroyed and so you're trying to reissue it so let's reissue this check so to do that i'm going to close my check register and i'm going to go to pay bills because this was a bill payment and here we should be able to see yes there's the bill from 1215 to the accountants for 563. so by voiding the check the bill is now open and needs to be paid again so we marked it and now we just go through our normal bill payment process and so we can say paste selected bills okay and here's our payment summary we can print the checks okay you want to make sure that the first check number is correct uh these other checks are things that have been entered in the system that have never been printed we just want to print our new check it'll assign it this first check number so obviously make sure that matches the printed checks you're sticking in your printer and there you go you'll hit ok and you have reprinted the check okay so that's how we void and reissue a general check the more difficult one are the paychecks employee paychecks so somebody's dog gets their paycheck and they need a new check not unusual so let's go to our check register again and this time let's pick a paycheck so just you know these are all fictional people this is uh this is sample data from quickbooks that helps accountants evaluate their software um so let's pick uh damon levy okay so we'll open his paycheck by double clicking okay so the issue with paychecks is that you don't want to actually void the original entry in quickbooks and the reason being is that it'll mess up your payroll reports right so this paycheck showing all these earnings and all these taxes being withheld these are being reflected in your fourth quarter 2025 payroll tax reports and if you change that after those payroll tax reports are filed or even after you've been making payroll tax deposits it can mess things up and make things really complicated so we don't want to change this actual check and that's what makes us a little bit more complicated we're still in compliance with the law right we need to report these payments on the date of the payday whether they actually cashed the check or not so we're not doing anything wrong we just need to reissue a new check but keep the check on in the current payroll tax report okay so we can see that this was number 2346 so i need to note that so after we make this change we're going to want to go back and create a new check for 2346 and void it okay but this check we're not going to void this check instead we are going to change the number on the check and actually what we can do is we can go up here and we can do a print later and so now it's set to print we can go to print check actually let's do print uh yeah let's do print check okay do you want to record the changes yes okay make sure you know the correct check number that's going to go into your printer enter that check number there hit ok and here we go once you hit print it's going to print the check and i will go ahead and print it even though i don't have any actual checks in there okay good now we can see that damon's paycheck is still there has the same date it just has the new check number of 2354 and so this hasn't affected our payroll tax reports which is what we're really looking for okay now we can save and close we can see here it's 23.54 but the problem is now we have no check 2346 anymore and that's a problem because we always want to make sure we're keeping track of our blank checks right you don't want blank checks floating around somewhere so we need to see what happened to 2346 when we look at this so the easiest thing to do is let's just go down here and on 12 let's put in check 23 46 and we'll we can actually still say it was to damon levy and we are going to just i don't give it a miscellaneous expense account and we're going to say voided 12 15 20 25 paycheck okay and there we go and so it has a zero amount and i'm just gonna head and go in and void it huh okay well it's having trouble there we go okay had trouble figuring out which field to click to get it to open up the check window so here we have the check now i'm just going to avoid it wouldn't even really have to do this since we have a zero amount but i may as well okay there we go so now we can save this and close it and now we have 2346 okay and it is avoided check okay great so that's how you void a payroll check you don't want to actually void the actual paycheck that'll create havoc with your payroll tax report so simply change the check number to the new number and then go back and create a new check and void it with the old check number so that you keep track of that great so that's how you void checks in quickbooks desktop i hope you found that useful you have a great day

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