Can you delete all transactions in QuickBooks Online and start over?
Not with one button — and the honest answer is that “delete everything” is usually the wrong question. Here is what QuickBooks actually lets you do, and what each route quietly costs.
No. QuickBooks Online has no bulk “delete all transactions” and no supported way to empty a company in one action. Your real options are to delete the records you do not want one at a time, to start a brand-new company file, or to export what you need and rebuild. Only the first keeps the same company — and it is by far the slowest.
Why there is no “delete everything” button
Deleting in QuickBooks Online is irreversible: there is no bin to restore from, and a deleted transaction can leave a reconciliation out of balance and erase part of your audit trail. A single button that removed every record in a live company would be the most destructive thing in the product. QuickBooks ships the opposite of that — locks, warnings, and one-at-a-time confirmation. So the absence of a wipe is a safety decision, and it is one a careful cleanup tool should respect rather than work around.
The three real options
1. Delete them by hand, one record at a time
This is the only route that keeps your company, your history and your reconciliation intact. It is also the slow one: at a steady pace that is roughly 15–25 records a minute at best, so a few hundred test entries is an afternoon and a bad import of several thousand is a week. If you go this way, the main bulk-delete page covers the per-type details — and the export-first rule that makes any of it safe.
2. Start a fresh company file
A new file is genuinely clean, and sometimes it is the right call — for example when the current file was set up wrong from the start. But be clear about the price. Starting again means rebuilding:
- the chart of accounts, and your opening balances;
- customers, vendors, items and services — QuickBooks does not copy lists from one company to another for you, so you re-enter them or use a third-party conversion tool;
- bank and card connections, re-linked and re-fed;
- and all history — every reconciliation and the entire audit trail.
If an accountant, a lender or a tax authority may need that history, this route is not available to you — not because of the software, but because of what you would be destroying.
3. Export what you need, then decide
Whatever you choose, do this first. Deletion is not reversible and there is no restore point, so the exact set you intend to remove should exist as a file — CSV or Excel — somewhere you will still have it next month. If you then start a fresh company, that file is your evidence of what the old one contained. If you delete by hand, it is your only backup.
Work out which problem you actually have
“Start over” tends to mean one of four quite different things, and they have different fixes:
- “A bad import created hundreds of junk entries.” You want to delete a specific batch, not everything. Keep the real records; remove the ones that came from the import.
- “I want a clean new financial year.” That is what closing the books is for — not deleting. Closing locks the prior period; it does not remove it.
- “The company file was set up wrong.” A new file is often correct here.
- “I just want the test entries gone.” The narrowest and most common case — and the one a filters-based cleanup handles best.
Can you just delete the company?
No — not yourself, and not by deleting the transactions inside it. In QuickBooks Online you can cancel the subscription, but a permanent erasure of the company’s data goes through Intuit support. Emptying the file record by record is a separate operation that keeps the company alive. If “start over” for you means a genuinely new business with new books, the new-file route is what you want; if it means the same business without the mess, you are back to deleting selectively.
Doing it in bulk
Multi-Delete is a tool we are building for the selective case: connect to QuickBooks, preview the exact set you want gone, force an export, dry run, then delete in batches and download a log of what was deleted and what was skipped, with reasons. It is not finished and not for sale, and it is not a “delete everything” button — by design. Everything on these pages stays free and needs no signup.
Questions people actually ask
Can you delete all transactions in QuickBooks Online and start over?
There is no bulk “delete all” button, and no supported way to wipe every transaction while keeping the company. The three real options are: delete them one at a time, start a brand-new company file, or export what you need and rebuild. Each keeps a different amount of your history, and the fresh-file route keeps none of it.
Is there a way to delete all transactions at once in QuickBooks Online?
No. QuickBooks Online has exactly one batch delete, and it only works on bank-feed entries you have not yet added to the books. Recorded transactions — purchases, invoices, journal entries, bills — are deleted one at a time. That is a deliberate safety choice, not a missing feature waiting to be added.
Should I start a new company file instead of deleting everything?
Sometimes, yes — it is the only route that gives you a genuinely clean file. But you lose the entire history: the chart of accounts, customers, vendors and items have to be rebuilt, opening balances re-entered, bank connections re-established, and any reconciliation and audit trail is gone. If anyone may need that history — an accountant, a lender, a tax authority — starting fresh is the wrong answer.
Can I delete a company file myself?
Not on your own, and not by deleting transactions. You can cancel the subscription, but a permanent erasure of the data goes through Intuit support. Emptying the file transaction by transaction is a different thing again — it keeps the company and removes the records, one at a time.
Will deleting transactions affect my accountant or my tax filing?
It can. Deleted transactions leave no trace, so anything already reported to a tax authority, reviewed by an accountant, or relied on by a lender can become unreconcilable after the fact. If the transactions have been filed or reported anywhere, export them first and talk to whoever prepared the reports before removing them.
Does QuickBooks Desktop have the same problem?
Partly. Desktop ships a “Batch delete or void transactions” tool in the Accountant Edition, so the bulk-cleanup job is easier there — plus a condense/cleanup utility for shrinking the file. QuickBooks Online, which this page is about, has no equivalent for recorded transactions.
Related: how to bulk delete transactions in QuickBooks Online · deleting journal entries · invoices and recurring transactions.