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About this lesson

Learn how to locate the various accounts payable reports, and how to drill down into the reports.

Quick reference

Note: This feature is available in QuickBooks Online Essentials, QuickBoooks Online Plus, and QuickBooks Online Advanced. This feature is not available in QuickBooks Simple Start.

Accounts Payable

Accounts payable is what it's called when your business owes someone else money. This is often shortened to A/P.

When to use

If your vendors/suppliers allow you to buy now and pay later, you should keep track of who you owe money to and when that money is due. The accounts payable feature of QuickBooks will allow you to see both summary and detailed information about the money you owe.

Instructions

Accounts payable reports:

  • Accounts payable aging detail: detail of the unpaid bills organized by when they are/were due 
  • Accounts payable aging summary: summary of of the unpaid bills organized by when they are/were due 
  • Vendor balance detail: detail of the unpaid bills organized by the vendor name
  • Vendor balance summary: summary of the unpaid invoices organized by the vendor name

Accessing reports:

  • Click on the word reports in the gray menu on the left side of the screen
  • In the search box on the right (where the faint text reads: find by report name) search "vendor" or "accounts" and let QuickBooks supply a list of potential reports to choose from
  • Select the report you want by clicking on it with your mouse

Hints & tips

  • There is not one right accounts payable report, look at these four common ones to decide what makes the most sense to you.
  • Customize the report if you're not seeing the data you'd like to see.
  • The money you owe is called accounts payable and this is tracked on the form called bill.
  • The money you are owed is called accounts receivable and this is tracked on the form called invoice.
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  • 00:04 In this video, I want to talk to you about the accounts payable.
  • 00:08 Whenever you enter a bill into QuickBooks to pay later,
  • 00:11 it shows up on your accounts payable report.
  • 00:14 Accounts payable as the opposite of accounts receivable.
  • 00:17 Accounts receivable is when you're asking for money and expecting to receive money.
  • 00:21 Accounts payable is when you owe money and you need to pay that money.
  • 00:25 Let's go ahead and look at the accounts payable report.
  • 00:29 On the left hand side of the screen, I'll have you click on Reports.
  • 00:32 Find by report name, will search for accounts payable,
  • 00:36 will start with the Aging Summary.
  • 00:41 When you generate the accounts payable Aging Summary, you can see who you
  • 00:46 owe money to, and how close is it to being due or how past due are you.
  • 00:50 So in this example we owe Candy R Us some money and
  • 00:53 we owe Plucky Paper Company some money.
  • 00:56 Let's go ahead and look at this from Plucky Paper Company.
  • 01:02 We owe $313, it's between 1 and 30 days past due.
  • 01:08 When I click on the 313, it's going to show me what I have a link,
  • 01:13 in this example I have one bill.
  • 01:15 Let me go ahead and click on that bill, When I look at this bill, I can
  • 01:21 see a couple of things, I can see that I didn't enter Terms when I added the bill.
  • 01:26 So by default, QuickBooks said, okay, this bill is due immediately.
  • 01:31 Let's imagine that they gave us 30 day Terms,
  • 01:35 let me change the terms from blank to Net 30.
  • 01:38 That doesn't change my Bill date, my Bill date remains the same, but
  • 01:43 my Due date suddenly moves forward by 30 days.
  • 01:46 In the lower right hand corner, I'm going to click on Save and Close.
  • 01:54 Now I'm going to go back to the report summary.
  • 01:56 Now when I look at it,
  • 01:57 I can see that Plucky Paper Company is in the current column.
  • 02:02 And that I'm no longer past due on any of my bills that I owe to them.
  • 02:06 In the cases when I need to enter bills and pay bills into QuickBooks,
  • 02:10 I don't want to know if I'm past due today.
  • 02:13 I want to know when I might be past due, or what's coming due,
  • 02:18 there's a handful of ways that I can look at this.
  • 02:21 One of them is I can say, all right, show me as of next week.
  • 02:26 So, what happens if I don't pay my bills until one week from now, click Run report.
  • 02:34 Candy R Us goes from being current as in not past due, to being past due.
  • 02:40 I might like this one for
  • 02:41 payment to make sure that the payment gets there before it's past due.
  • 02:46 I might say, okay, I don't want that, I'll leave it like today's date.
  • 02:51 But I want to see instead of 30 days here, just show me 7 days and
  • 02:56 the number of periods right now I have 4 periods.
  • 03:00 So I have 1 to 31, 31 to 60, etc.
  • 03:03 Show me 10 periods, Run report.
  • 03:07 Now I can kind of see, okay, nothing's past due, nothing is super past due.
  • 03:11 This might be something that's useful for you, it might not be.
  • 03:14 Let me show you something else, let's go to Reports on the left hand side.
  • 03:21 Let's go find my report name and this time we'll say accounts payable aging detail.
  • 03:26 Now I can see at a glance the things that are current,
  • 03:30 if I had more stuff that was due I'd have more running down my list.
  • 03:35 Who do I owe and what's the due date, and how close am I to being past due?
  • 03:40 So this might be a good report, this report might resonate with you.
  • 03:45 Another thing that you might enjoy seeing is the vendor balance summary.
  • 03:49 So let's go to Reports, find by report name, and
  • 03:53 we'll say vendor and then Vendor Balance Summary.
  • 03:57 You can just see at a glance, who do I owe?
  • 04:00 I owe candy R Us, I owe Plucky Paper, I bought $4,000 with the money I owe.
  • 04:05 Maybe you like this, but you do not want to come over here to get it,
  • 04:10 you just care about this total number of $4,000.
  • 04:14 It also shows up on your balance sheet, let me show you that.
  • 04:18 Let's click on Reports, let's click on Balance Sheet.
  • 04:25 Our Balance Sheet is set up by default to show the cash accounting method.
  • 04:30 Accounts payable will not show up in a cash Accounting methods,
  • 04:33 you need to click the circle to toggle to Accrual.
  • 04:36 On the right hand side, click on Run report.
  • 04:40 And then we'll go down and we'll take a look,
  • 04:42 there's the accounts payable of $4,000.
  • 04:45 The reason I like those reports I was just showing you is that if I click on this
  • 04:50 $4,000, I'm not going to see something that makes a whole lot of sense to me.
  • 04:55 It definitely can read these words, but imagine the list was longer,
  • 04:59 you'd have a harder time identifying what bills are paid.
  • 05:03 In this case, Amazing Armchairs, it's already been paid.
  • 05:07 But if you look at the running balance to the right, you can't really tell that.
  • 05:11 So while you can click on this and you can drill down and see this information,
  • 05:15 I think it's easier to generate the other reports.

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