A transaction marked Cleared has been checked off as matching your bank or credit card statement, either during a reconciliation or manually in the register. It's confirmed real. It isn't the same as Reconciled, which only applies once an entire statement period's reconciliation is finished and locked. Cleared is a step on the way there, not the finish line.
1. Look at the account register. Open Chart of Accounts, click the account, and view the register. There's a checkmark column that shows a transaction's status: blank means not cleared, C means cleared, R means reconciled.
2. Clearing happens two ways. Either by checking a transaction off during the formal Reconcile process against a statement, or by clicking directly in that checkmark column in the register to mark something cleared ad hoc, without running a full reconciliation.
3. Reconciled is the status after that. When a reconciliation finishes (the difference hits zero and you click Finish now), every transaction that was checked off during that reconciliation flips from C to R. Reconciled transactions are also locked against casual editing in a way cleared-but-not-reconciled ones aren't.
4. Your cleared balance is a running total. It's the sum of everything marked C or R as of today, which is the number QuickBooks and most banks use as the quick sanity check against what the bank currently shows, separate from your full book balance that also includes things like an uncashed check.
Someone manually clicks a batch of transactions to C in the register, sees a clean-looking list, and treats the books as done for the month. Nothing's actually locked in though, since marking something cleared by hand skips the formal reconciliation that checks the whole period against an actual statement balance. Reconciliation can get skipped entirely this way without anyone noticing until an accountant goes looking.
The other failure mode is treating a cleared transaction as safe to edit or delete because it's "already handled." It isn't locked the way a reconciled one is; editing a cleared transaction can quietly throw off a reconciliation that hasn't happened yet, and nothing in the interface stops you from doing it.
Transactions from a payment processor or POS get checked against QuickBooks and marked cleared automatically once they genuinely match, instead of someone eyeballing a register and clicking checkmarks by hand.
Accounts where transactions have sat cleared for a long stretch without the account ever actually being reconciled get flagged for review, catching a skipped reconciliation before it turns into a bigger mess at year-end.
Tell us how reconciliation gets handled in your business today, and we'll tell you if the gap between cleared and reconciled is something worth catching automatically.
Tell us how reconciliation happens today, who does it and how often, and we'll tell you whether anything's slipping through as cleared without ever getting finished. And this isn't limited to reconciliation; the same question is worth asking about anything else in the business that looks done but hasn't actually been checked.
Let's talk →The total of every transaction in an account marked C or R as of today. It's a quicker sanity check against your bank's current balance than your full book balance, which also includes things that haven't shown up on a statement yet, like a check you wrote that hasn't been cashed.
Open the account register, find the transaction, and click directly in its checkmark column. One click sets it to C. This works outside of a formal reconciliation, which is useful for a quick check but doesn't replace actually reconciling the account against a statement.
No. Cleared means a transaction has been matched against a statement or checked off manually. Reconciled means it was included in a reconciliation that was actually finished, which also locks it against casual edits. Every reconciled transaction was cleared at some point; not every cleared transaction has been through a finished reconciliation yet.
QuickBooks doesn't keep a separate "date it cleared" timestamp apart from the transaction's own date. Check the register for its C or R status, or run a reconciliation report for the period it was included in, to see roughly when it got checked off.
No, and these two get confused because they share the word. Clearing undeposited funds is moving a received payment out of the temporary Undeposited Funds account into an actual bank deposit. It has nothing to do with the Cleared status on a reconciled transaction covered here.