Unmatched transactions accumulate in QuickBooks for a variety of reasons that range from corrupted bank download files to incorrect matching practices.  Whatever the cause, the general consensus is that these unmatched transactions are unwanted and annoying; having to wade through them on a regular basis to find the transactions that need to be matched is a chore.  Unfortunately, a method to delete unmatched transactions is not readily apparent in on the Match Transactions section in QuickBooks.

There is some info available on the Intuit support forms; however, it’s pretty messy and takes awhile to dig through so we have pulled everything together into a concise set of steps that can be followed to remove unwanted, unmatched transactions:

1. Make sure you have matched all the transactions that you want to match and that only unwanted transactions remain unmatched.
2. From the top menu select Banking > Online Banking  > Online Banking Center (the menu options may be slightly different if you are using a version of QB other than QB 2011 Pro, but essentially all you need to do is get to the Online Banking Center).
3. In the lower box in the Online Banking Center titled Items Received From Financial Institution, highlight the institution for which you want to the delete unmatched transactions.
4. On the right side of the screen, click the Delete button.
5. All set!  You should not encounter any unmatched transactions.  However, as unmatched transactions do accumulate over time, you’ll probably want to follow these steps to clean them out periodically.

Note:  We use QuickBooks Pro 2011, but this method should work for all versions that allow the download of bank data.