Make Accounts Inactive in QuickBooks

It's helpful to keep your chart of accounts organized. QuickBooks Online allows you to make accounts inactive instead of deleting them, which enables access to past transaction data for reporting purposes. It's also the only way to manage accounts created by QuickBooks that are considered "permanent" accounts.

Before inactivating a balance sheet account, make sure its balance is zero. If it isn’t, QuickBooks Online will create an automatic adjustment entry to zero it out. This automatic entry is added to the Opening Balance Equity account. This can affect past-year balances and cause wrong tax reporting.

Making an account inactive doesn't remove its transactions. Transactions associated with any deactivated (deleted) account stay intact.
You can't edit a transaction associated with an inactive account. To edit or delete the transaction, you must restore the account first.

Make an account inactive:

Go to Settings ⚙ and select Chart of Accounts.
Find the account you want to delete.
Select the Action ▼ dropdown and select Make inactive.

See inactive accounts
When you run reports, you’ll still see inactive accounts and their transactions. QuickBooks includes them to keep everything accurate. You can customize some reports to hide inactive accounts, but this may affect accuracy.

If you want to see your inactive accounts in your chart of accounts:

Select Settings ⚙, then select Chart of accounts.
Next to the printer icon, choose the Settings ⚙ icon.
Select the Include inactive checkbox.

For more details, check out this article on the QuickBooks Support site.

Make Accounts Inactive in QuickBooks

Some permanent or formerly active accounts in QuickBooks cannot be deleted, even if they are not in use. In these cases, the best option is to make them inactive so they don't show in your system.