Click + New, choose Check, pick the bank account and payee, assign a category to each line, and save. This records the check as a transaction regardless of whether QuickBooks ever actually prints it, which matters if you're logging a check you already wrote by hand or one that went out through a different process entirely. Here's the full walkthrough.
1. Open a new check. Click + New, then Check under the Vendors column.
2. Pick the bank account the check is drawn on. This matters more than it sounds like it should; picking the wrong account here means the transaction posts against the wrong balance entirely.
3. Pick the payee and enter the check number. If you're recording a check you already wrote by hand, enter the number it was actually written with so your register matches reality. If QuickBooks is going to print this one, you can leave the number blank and it assigns one automatically when it prints.
4. Assign a category (or several) to the line items. Same rule as any other transaction: split it across accounts if the check covers more than one kind of expense.
5. Decide whether to print it, then save. Uncheck Print later if the check already went out by hand or some other way and you're only recording it here. Leave it checked if you want this check added to QuickBooks' print queue, which is where the separate check-printing process picks up.
QuickBooks treats writing a check as recording a transaction and printing it as a separate, optional action, and that split is easy to miss if you're only ever doing both at once. The gap matters most for anyone recording checks after the fact: a petty cash check, a handwritten check from a job site, a check someone wrote before QuickBooks was even open that day.
Skip recording it as a check specifically, and the same payment could get logged as a generic expense instead, which loses the check number and makes it harder to match against a bank statement later, or to answer a vendor who asks which check number their payment went out on.
The manual part isn't the form itself, it's remembering to go back and log every check that didn't start inside QuickBooks in the first place. That's easy to lose track of when checks get written in the field, away from a computer, hours or days before anyone sits down to enter them.
A check number and amount texted in from a job site or vehicle gets entered as a QuickBooks check transaction right away, categorized and matched to the right vendor, instead of sitting in someone's memory until the next office day.
When a handwritten check clears the bank before anyone's recorded it in QuickBooks, the mismatch gets flagged automatically so it gets entered before it's forgotten, instead of surfacing as a confusing unreconciled item weeks later.
Tell us where that gap is, in the field, between offices, on someone's desk, and we'll tell you if it's worth closing automatically.
Tell us how a check actually gets written in your business before it ever reaches QuickBooks, and we'll tell you honestly whether that lag is worth closing with automation. Check recording is just one gap; the same question is worth asking about anything else that happens away from your software before it gets entered.
Let's talk →Don't use + New > Check for this; use + New > Pay bills instead, select the open bill, and choose check as the payment method there. Writing a separate check transaction for a bill that's already entered creates a duplicate record instead of marking the existing bill as paid.
If it's refunding a customer, use + New > Refund receipt instead of a plain check, which keeps the refund tied to the original sale and customer record correctly. A standard check transaction works fine for a refund that isn't tied to a specific customer sale, like returning a vendor deposit.
Yes. Open the check and select More, then Void. This zeroes out the amount while keeping the transaction and check number on record, which is usually the better move for a check that was voided for a real reason, lost, damaged, printed wrong, rather than deleted and erased from history entirely.