Accounts

When you post sales as a Daily summary, each closed day posts as one journal entry — the day’s totals, not the individual sales. So QuickBooks needs to know which account each figure in that entry belongs to. You set this up once under Map accounts.

This is only needed when sales post as a Daily summary. If you post each sale as a receipt, you map products and add-ons to items instead — see How sales post.

What you map

A daily summary carries the day’s figures, and you map each to a QuickBooks account:

• Sales — your net sales, sales discounts, and sales returns.
• Tax — the VAT you collected.
• Money owed & taken in advance — accounts receivable and customer deposits.
• Cost & stock — cost of goods sold, and inventory.
• Add-ons — tips, service charge, and surcharge, each posting to its own account. Service charge and surcharge are your store’s own income; a tip is treated as money you owe your staff, not your income, so by default it posts to a liability account rather than an income one. You can change how each add-on is treated — your income, or money you owe onward. These are the daily-summary counterpart of mapping add-ons to items — a day that carried a tip posts the tip to the account you pick here.
• Kept deposits — when you cancel an order but keep part of the customer’s deposit (a restocking or cancellation fee), that kept amount is your income and posts to its own account. It only appears on a day where you actually kept a deposit.

Map accounts receivable to a clearing or Undeposited Funds account, not a real A/R account — a daily summary can’t carry the customer a true A/R line needs, so a real A/R account would hold the day instead of posting it.

Map your accounts

1. On the QuickBooks page, open Map accounts.
2. For each figure, search your QuickBooks chart of accounts and pick the account it should post to.
3. Saving asks you to confirm with two-factor authentication — it’s how Swann Retail protects a change that decides where your money posts.

Connecting auto-matches most accounts; you fill in or confirm the rest.

When a day won’t post for an account

Swann Retail never guesses an account, and it never posts a day with a figure missing — so the day is held rather than booked wrong. You’ll find held days under Fixing what won’t post:

• An account isn’t mapped — a figure in the day (sales, VAT, a discount) has no QuickBooks account, or its account can’t take a daily summary (the accounts-receivable case above). Open Map accounts and fix it.
• A sale add-on isn’t mapped — the day carried a tip, service charge or surcharge whose account you haven’t mapped yet. Open Map accounts and map the add-on account.

To clear either: map what was missing. Mapping it clears the row and re-posts the held day on its own at the next sync — you don’t have to re-post it or mark it Resolved by hand. To post a held day right away rather than wait, see Post a day yourself.

This is the same idea as an unmapped product or tax code — Swann Retail would rather hold a day than post it wrong, so the fix is always: map what was missing.