QuickBooks: Make Accounts Inactive

Keeping your chart of accounts organized is essential for accurate financial reporting. In QuickBooks Online, you can make accounts inactive instead of deleting them — this preserves access to historical transaction data and is the only way to manage built-in QuickBooks accounts, which are considered permanent and cannot be deleted.

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 a transaction, you must first reactivate the account.

Make an account inactive:

Go to Settings ⚙ and select Chart of Accounts.
Find the account you want to make inactive.
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.
Select the Settings ⚙ icon at the top of the account list.
Select the Include inactive checkbox.

For more details on managing your chart of accounts, visit this article on the QuickBooks Support site.

QuickBooks: Make Accounts Inactive

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.