Open the payment (via the customer's profile or Sales > All Sales), then choose Void to zero it out while keeping a record of it, or More > Delete to remove it outright. Both work cleanly on a standalone payment. A payment already swept into a bank deposit is a narrower, separate problem with its own extra step.
1. Find the payment. Go to Sales > All Sales and filter the type to Payment, or open it directly from the customer's own transaction list.
2. Decide what you actually need: void, delete, or unapply. Voiding zeroes the amount but keeps the transaction on record, marked voided. Deleting removes it from QuickBooks entirely, with no trace. Unapplying leaves the payment and the money alone but detaches it from the invoice it's currently applied to.
3. To void a payment, open it, select More, then Void. Confirm when asked. This reopens whatever invoice the payment was applied to as unpaid again, while leaving a visible record that something was recorded and then reversed.
4. To delete a payment instead, open it, select More, then Delete. Confirm. This also reopens the related invoice as unpaid, but leaves no record the payment ever existed, which matters if you've already reported on it.
5. If the payment itself is fine but it's applied to the wrong invoice, unapply it rather than voiding or deleting. Open the payment, uncheck the invoice it's currently matched to, and save. The amount becomes an unapplied credit you can then apply to the correct invoice.
6. Check for a deposit link before doing any of this. If the payment screen shows it's already part of a bank deposit, voiding or deleting it directly will throw that deposit's total out of balance. That's a different, more specific situation (see the FAQ below) and it needs to be handled from the deposit side first.
Void, delete, and unapply all look similar from the payment screen, one click away from each other, but they solve different problems. Pick the wrong one and you either destroy a record you actually needed to keep, or you leave an invoice tangled up with a payment that never belonged to it in the first place.
The bigger cost usually isn't any single correction, it's that the same mistake keeps happening the same way. A payment synced in twice from a bank feed, a payment applied to the wrong invoice because two were open at once, someone fixes it by hand, correctly, and then does it again next month because nothing changed about why it happened.
When a payment arrives through more than one path, a bank feed match and a manually entered record for the same transaction, the duplicate gets caught and flagged before it's recorded twice, instead of someone noticing after the fact.
If an invoice gets edited or voided after a payment was already applied to it, the payment unlinks and waits for reapplication automatically, instead of someone discovering the mismatch during reconciliation weeks later.
Tell us where the bad payments usually originate, a sync issue, a data-entry habit, two people touching the same invoice, and we'll tell you if it's fixable at the source.
Tell us what keeps going wrong, duplicate entries, payments landing on the wrong invoice, something else, and we'll tell you whether the real fix is upstream of QuickBooks entirely. Payment corrections are one example of a recurring manual fix; we track down the same pattern wherever else it shows up in a business.
Let's talk →Voiding keeps the transaction visible in your records with the amount zeroed out and a voided flag, which preserves an audit trail. Deleting removes it completely, as if it never happened. If anyone else has already seen or relied on that payment record, voiding is almost always the safer choice.
Open the payment, find the invoice it's currently checked against, and uncheck it, then save. The payment amount stays recorded as money received, but it's no longer tied to that invoice, and you can apply it to the correct one from there.
Not directly, and that's a different, more specific situation than a standalone payment. QuickBooks blocks voiding or deleting a payment once it's grouped into a deposit, because doing so would throw that deposit's total off. You have to open the deposit, remove that payment's line from it, save, and then void or delete the payment normally from there.
Voiding or deleting a payment reopens the invoice it was applied to as unpaid again; the sale itself stays exactly as it was. Only unapplying leaves the invoice's status ambiguous until you either reapply the payment elsewhere or apply a different one.