does amazon withhold some amount from each of your bimonthly deposits do you want to be able to keep
track of that in QuickBooks well this video will show you how to do one adjustment at the
very beginning so you're unavailable balance can always match the amount on the Amazon statement
if you have any questions about this topic you can leave them in the comment section below and
I'll do my best to help you and of course if you feel the video helped you I hope you will
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what is the unavailable balance that's listed on your bimonthly Amazon deposit statement it's
an amount that Amazon with holds and will pay you in the next statement it is technically a current
asset like a receivable because you will receive it in the future the bottom of the statement shows
the amount withheld until the next statement and the top of the statement shows the amount from
last time released and added to the payout on the current statement the balance of the asset
account should equal the amount that is receivable in the future which means the amount on your trial
balance should always be equal to the amount at the bottom of the most recent statement so
here we have the example statement this is the amount that they released from last time that
you actually added to the deposit as a positive number and on the bottom of the statement is the
amount they're actually withholding till next time that's the amount that really should show
in account unavailable balance in your QuickBooks records but you see after we recorded our deposit
what was showing you the unavailable balance was not the amount that you will receive it was an
incorrect amount it's actually currently showing the difference between the unavailable about that
was withheld last statement and the unavailable amount that was withheld this statement so if
you followed along step by step you have the difference between the amount released from
last time and the amount withheld this time but it's better to actually have it show the amount
you're expecting to receive in the next statement you will also notice it's on the credit side so
if it's an asset that you expect to receive and it's on the credit side you should just know that
all that means is that it's a negative number but we'll deal with that in a second so how do
you get the unavailable amount in your QuickBooks records to actually equal the amount you're going
to receive in the next statement well it would be equal to that amount receivable if you actually
started these procedures at the very beginning when you open your Amazon store in other words
in your very first statement the amount withheld from last time would be zero because there would
be no last time so if nothing from last time would be added to the deposit that means the amount
withheld this time on this statement would be the amount you subtract from the deposit and the
amount that would be in the unavailable balance asset account but now you are not starting from
zero or let's assume that you're not starting from zero because you have been recording things and
then you learn and then you watch these this video series and learn how to do it so what if you're
not starting from zero what if you have the amount that we have now well how do you get it to match
very simple you only have to adjust it one time and if you make a simple journal entry to bring
it to the current balance then all you have to do is follow our procedures for deposits forever
going forward and then it will match every time and show you the real unavailable balance that
you can expect to receive in the next statement in other words this is the amount that it should be
because that's the amount at the bottom that you expect to receive in the next statement however
this is what it is in our current records if we look at our trial balance now it's showing
the difference between the beginning and ending of last statement because we didn't start these
procedures at the very beginning when you open your store we just started doing it in
the middle so it's showing the difference it's not really showing the amount you're going to
receive so what you have to do is find the difference and of course the amount in our
trial balance now is actually a negative number that's why it's on the credit side instead of
the debit side so if you remember your elementary school math when you find the difference between
a positive and negative number you learned in elementary school you have to add them together
but anyway this is the amount of the adjustment and all you have to do is adjust it once and it
will be correct every time going forward if you follow our deposit procedures so we're
going to make a journal entry and the balancing account is the opening balance equity account
so here's the trial balance in our QuickBooks online account it's a negative 942 25 because
it's on the credit side and the receivable amount should really be on the debit side so we will make
a journal entry for this amount so we click new we go over to where it says journal entry and
the proper date of the journal entry should really be the day that you started business
because it's really setting it up and preparing but anyway the numbers will work out right now
the account to debit is the unavailable balance and the unavailable balance we will debit for ten
thousand six hundred dollars and two cents and the balancing credit is the account that we use for
all of our balancing entries when we do our set up opening balance equity ten thousand six hundred
two dollars when we click Save and close now you can see the unavailable balance now reflects the
actual amount that we expect to receive in our next payout from the next bimonthly deposit and as
you can see that was the amount that they actually gave us excuse me that they actually withheld
from April third that we expect to receive or at least some of it in the next deposit from Amazon
you