Bad debt in QBO is what happens when an invoice you fully expected to collect turns out to be worthless. The customer went out of business, stopped answering, disputed the work, or simply vanished. The invoice still sits in Accounts Receivable, inflating your assets and, on an accrual basis, income you'll never see. Writing it off cleans that up. It moves the balance out of A/R and into a Bad Debt expense account so your books tell the truth.
Bad debt in QBO is what happens when an invoice you fully expected to collect turns out to be worthless. The customer went out of business, stopped answering, disputed the work, or simply vanished. The invoice still sits in Accounts Receivable, inflating your assets and, on an accrual basis, income you'll never see. Writing it off cleans that up. It moves the balance out of A/R and into a Bad Debt expense account so your books tell the truth.
QuickBooks Online doesn't have a single "write off" button on the invoice screen. Instead, Intuit's documented method uses a credit memo tied to a special Bad Debts product/service item, which you then apply against the open invoice through Receive Payment. It's a six-step routine, and once you've done it twice it takes under five minutes. There's also a journal-entry approach and, for accountants, a bulk Write Off Invoices tool in QuickBooks Online Accountant. Each has trade-offs we'll cover.
This topic shows up on the ProAdvisor exam because it touches so many core skills: chart of accounts setup, products and services, credit memos, applying payments, and reading the A/R Aging report. If you're preparing, work through a quickbooks certification exam practice test after reading this guide and you'll recognize the question patterns immediately. Let's start with what actually qualifies as bad debt before we touch a single screen.
Bad debt is an amount a customer legitimately owes you that you've concluded you won't collect. That last part matters. A slow payer isn't bad debt. A customer who disputes half an invoice isn't bad debt either; that's a pricing adjustment and belongs on a normal credit memo against sales. Bad debt is the leftover balance after you've made a real effort to collect and decided the effort isn't worth continuing.
In QuickBooks Online the evidence lives in the Accounts Receivable Aging Detail report. Open it, sort by the 91+ days column, and you'll see the candidates. Good qbo bookkeeping practice is to review that report monthly and flag anything that's aged past your collection policy. Some firms write off at 120 days, others at 180, and some wait until a collection agency returns the account. QBO doesn't enforce a rule. You do.
Why not just delete the invoice? Because deleting rewrites history. The sale happened, the revenue posted, and if you're on an accrual basis it already hit a tax year. Deleting also breaks the audit trail and any sales tax you reported. A proper write-off leaves the original invoice intact and adds a dated, documented entry that explains where the money went. That's the version an auditor, a lender, or the ProAdvisor exam expects to see.
There are two ways to account for bad debt, and QBO supports both. The direct write-off method is the simple one: when a specific invoice becomes uncollectible, you expense it right then. Nothing is estimated in advance. Most small businesses use this because it's easy, and it's also the method the IRS generally requires for tax purposes. The downside is timing. The sale might be recorded in December and the write-off in the following March, so the expense lands in a different period than the revenue.
The allowance method fixes that mismatch and is what GAAP prefers for businesses with meaningful receivables. At period end you estimate how much of A/R will go bad, usually as a percentage of credit sales or by weighting each aging bucket, and you book that estimate as Bad Debt Expense against a contra-asset called Allowance for Doubtful Accounts. When a specific invoice dies later, you write it off against the allowance, not against expense. Net receivables on the balance sheet stay realistic all year.
Setting either method up starts in the chart of accounts. If you're building a client file from scratch, starting from proven qbo coa templates saves time because a Bad Debts expense account is usually already there. Anyone working toward a quickbooks bookkeeping certification should be able to explain both methods and, more importantly, say which one a given client should use and why.
Where — Settings (gear) → Chart of accounts → New.
Account type — Expenses. Detail type — Bad debts. Name it "Bad Debt" or "Bad Debt Expense" so it's obvious on the Profit and Loss.
Check first — many QBO files already have this account from the default chart. Search before creating a duplicate; two bad debt accounts is a common cleanup headache.
Where — Settings → Products and services → New → Non-inventory.
Name — "Bad Debts". Income account — choose the Bad Debt expense account you just created, not a sales account. This mapping is the whole trick: when the item appears on a credit memo, QBO debits that expense instead of reducing revenue.
Sales tax — leave the item non-taxable unless your state lets you reclaim tax on written-off sales and you intend to.
Only for the allowance method. Create "Allowance for Doubtful Accounts" as an Other Current Asset. It will carry a credit (negative) balance that offsets A/R on the balance sheet.
Why not an A/R type? QBO expects a customer on every A/R-type transaction and only one A/R line per journal entry, which makes a second receivables account awkward. Other Current Asset avoids that.
Period-end entry — debit Bad Debt Expense, credit Allowance for the estimated amount.
This is the workflow Intuit documents and the one exam questions are built around. First, confirm the balance. Open the invoice or run the A/R Aging Detail report and note exactly what's still open, because partial payments are common and you only write off the unpaid remainder.
Second, make sure the Bad Debt expense account and the Bad Debts item from the tabs above exist. Third, create the credit memo: + New → Credit memo, pick the customer, choose the Bad Debts item, enter the uncollectible amount, and type "Bad Debt" in the memo field so the reason is visible later.
Fourth, apply it. Go to + New → Receive payment, select the same customer, and QBO will list the open invoice under Outstanding Transactions and the credit memo under Credits. Tick both. The amount received should show as zero. Save. The invoice is now marked paid, A/R drops by the written-off amount, and Bad Debt expense rises by the same figure. Fifth, run the Bad Debt account's register or a Profit and Loss to confirm it posted where you expected.
Sixth, and this is optional but smart, edit the customer's display name to add "(Bad Debt)" or set a note so nobody extends credit again without noticing. If a bookkeeper handles this for several clients, confirm their qbo accountant access level allows credit memos and payments; a Reports-only user can see the aging problem but can't fix it.
Run Accounts Receivable Aging Detail and note the exact unpaid remainder on the invoice.
Chart of accounts → New → Expenses, detail type Bad debts. Skip if one already exists.
Non-inventory product/service mapped to the Bad Debt expense account, non-taxable.
+ New → Credit memo for the customer, Bad Debts item, uncollectible amount, memo "Bad Debt".
Select the invoice and the credit memo; amount received is $0. Invoice shows as paid.
Check the Bad Debt account report, then add a note or rename the customer so credit is not re-extended.
Some bookkeepers prefer a journal entry: debit Bad Debt Expense, credit Accounts Receivable with the customer's name on the A/R line. It works, and it's the entry you'd write on an accounting exam. In QBO, though, a journal entry that credits A/R doesn't automatically close the invoice. You still have to go to Receive Payment, select the invoice and the journal entry credit, and save at zero. Forget that step and the invoice stays open on the aging report while the general ledger says it's gone.
The journal entry also skips the Bad Debts item, so it won't show up in item-based sales reports, and it can't reverse sales tax. For those reasons the credit memo method is generally the safer habit, especially in files where several people post transactions. Save journal entries for the allowance estimate at period end.
If you work in QuickBooks Online Accountant, there's a third route: Accountant Tools → Write off invoices. You filter by invoice age, balance, and date, pick a write-off account, and QBO processes a batch at once. It's fast for cleanup engagements. The catch every quickbooks proadvisor should know is that the tool adjusts the original invoices rather than posting a fresh dated credit, which can change a period you've already closed or reconciled and doesn't handle sales tax cleanly. Use it with the books open and a backup report in hand.
Here's the rule that trips up more small business owners than any QBO screen: if you report on a cash basis, you generally can't deduct bad debt. You never recorded the income, because the customer never paid, so there's nothing to deduct. The write-off still matters for your books, since it clears the phantom receivable, but don't expect a tax deduction.
Accrual-basis businesses recognized the revenue when they invoiced, so when the invoice goes bad they can deduct it as a business bad debt. The IRS explains the distinction in Topic 453, Bad Debt Deduction, and it's worth reading before advising a client.
For accrual businesses the IRS expects the specific charge-off method for tax, meaning you deduct particular debts in the year they become worthless. The allowance method's estimated expense isn't deductible until specific invoices are actually written off. That's why many firms keep GAAP books on the allowance method and make a tax adjustment at year end. When you prepare that reconciliation, the cleanest source is the Bad Debt account detail; you can export quickbooks report to excel and tie each line to a customer and invoice.
Sales tax is the other trap. If the original invoice charged tax that you remitted to the state, some states allow a bad debt deduction on a later sales tax return. QBO's Bad Debts item is non-taxable, so the credit memo won't reverse the tax by itself. Handle that on the return, not in the memo. And before deciding an invoice is uncollectible, make sure you've matched every deposit; a bookkeeper who has to import bank statements to qbo weeks late often finds the "unpaid" invoice was paid by a transfer nobody applied.
The source list. Sort by the 91+ days column to find invoices that are candidates for write-off before you touch any transaction.
Bad Debt expense appears under Expenses. A recovery posted through the Bad Debts item reduces this same line.
Accounts Receivable falls by the written-off amount. Under the allowance method, Allowance for Doubtful Accounts offsets A/R as a contra-asset.
Shows the invoice, the credit memo, and the zero-dollar payment side by side, which is the audit trail an accountant wants to see.
You don't have to experiment on a real client file. Intuit's quickbooks sample company, Craig's Design and Landscaping Services, ships with open invoices, an existing chart of accounts, and enough messy receivables to make the exercise realistic. Nothing you do there is saved permanently; the file resets when you close the browser, so you can run the whole write-off routine, break something, and start again.
A good drill: open the qbo sample company test drive, run the A/R Aging Summary, pick the customer with the oldest balance, and write off the full amount using the credit memo method. Then run a Profit and Loss and a Balance Sheet and confirm the expense went up while A/R went down by the same figure.
Next, undo it mentally: what would you do if that customer paid a month later? Try it. Create an invoice or sales receipt using the Bad Debts item so the recovery credits the expense account, and watch the P&L move back.
Repeat the exercise with the journal entry method and notice that the invoice still shows open until you apply the credit in Receive Payment. That single observation answers a whole family of exam questions. Because the quickbooks online sample company is free and always available, there's no reason to walk into the certification exam without having done this at least twice.
The most frequent error is mapping the Bad Debts item to an income account. The credit memo then reduces sales instead of creating an expense, revenue looks lower than it was, and the bad debt line on the P&L never appears. Always open the item and confirm the income account field points at the expense account. The second most common mistake is creating the credit memo and never applying it. QBO holds it as an unapplied credit, the invoice stays open, and the aging report keeps nagging you about a balance that's really gone.
Writing off too early is a quieter problem. Bookkeepers who fall behind on bank feeds sometimes conclude an invoice is uncollectible when the payment simply hasn't been matched yet. If you ever have to convert a bank statement to qbo format and import it after the fact, reconcile before you write anything off. Reversing a bad debt entry is more work than posting it.
Finally, watch the dates. A credit memo dated inside a closed period reopens that period's numbers and, if you've locked the books with a closing date, QBO will warn you or block it depending on your settings. Date the write-off in the current period, when you made the decision. On the exam and in real life, the write-off date is the date the debt became worthless, not the invoice date. Anyone pursuing a qbo bookkeeping certification should be ready to explain that timing rule in one sentence.
Don't reopen or edit the old invoice. Create a new invoice or sales receipt for the customer using the Bad Debts item for the amount received. Because that item points at the Bad Debt expense account, the payment credits the expense and reduces it, which is exactly what a recovery should do. If you prefer a separate line on the P&L, set up a "Bad Debt Recovered" income account and map a second item to it. Either way, the original write-off stays intact and the audit trail shows both events.
The certification exam rarely asks "what is bad debt." It asks what happens in QBO when you do something. Expect scenario questions like: a client's invoice from eight months ago is uncollectible; which sequence of transactions writes it off without changing the original sale? The answer is the credit memo with the Bad Debts item applied through Receive Payment. Or: after a bookkeeper posts a journal entry crediting A/R, why does the invoice still appear on the aging report? Because the credit hasn't been applied to the invoice.
You'll also see questions about report effects. Which report shows the candidates for write-off? A/R Aging Detail or Summary. Which financial statement carries Bad Debt expense? The Profit and Loss, under expenses. What happens to the balance sheet? Accounts Receivable falls. Under the allowance method, what account offsets A/R? Allowance for Doubtful Accounts. These are quick points if you've practiced, and expensive ones if you're guessing under time pressure.
The best preparation is a mix of doing and drilling. Do the sample company exercise above, then work through qbo proadvisor free questions and answers until the receivables workflow questions feel automatic. Pay particular attention to any question that mentions a zero-dollar payment; that phrase is almost always pointing at the credit memo application step.
Bad debt in QBO comes down to one disciplined routine: review the aging report, confirm the balance is really uncollectible, issue a credit memo with a Bad Debts item that points at an expense account, and apply it to the invoice at zero received. Everything else, the allowance method, the journal entry alternative, the accountant's bulk tool, is a variation on that theme with its own timing and audit-trail consequences. Choose the method that matches the client's basis of accounting and the size of their receivables, then apply it consistently.
Keep the tax rules in mind as you go. Cash-basis clients get clean books but no deduction. Accrual clients get a deduction for specific debts in the year they go bad, not for estimates. Sales tax lives on the return, not in the memo. Write those three sentences on a sticky note and half the questions people ask about this topic answer themselves.
If you're heading for certification, treat this article as a lab manual. Run the workflow in the sample company, break it on purpose, fix it, and then take the practice tests linked throughout this page until receivables questions stop slowing you down. The exam rewards people who have actually clicked through the screens, and bad debt is one of the few topics where a twenty-minute drill covers nearly everything you'll be asked.