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About this lesson

Let's discuss common mistakes found on the accounts payable report.

Quick reference

Accounts Payable

It's important to keep an eye on your accounts payable details to ensure there are no mistakes.

When to use

You should review this report weekly or monthly depending on your business as a regular part of your business. In this lesson, we'll focus on ways to review your vendor balances. Your goal is to ensure that vendors who you have paid are not showing an outstanding balance.

Instructions

There are a few different reports that I'm going to show you, as you work through this lesson, think about which report(s) work best for you and your needs.

The goal:

  • Look for any vendors who show a balance due that is incorrect
  • Look for any vendors who show a balance due of $0.00 

Reports you may wish to look at:

  • Accounts payable aging summary 
  • Accounts payable aging detail
  • Vendor balance detail
  • Vendor balance summary

Hints & tips

  • It's important to clean up or correct any incorrect balances because it's not just the accounts payable reports that are wrong when this happens.
  • Another report which isn't used for error checking but can help you identify which payments were assigned to a given bill is the report called the Bills and Applied Payments report.
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  • 00:04 In this video, I want to talk to you about finding and
  • 00:07 correcting mistakes on the accounts payable report.
  • 00:10 This is going to be real similar to finding and
  • 00:12 correcting mistakes on the accounts receivable report.
  • 00:15 We're going to go to the left hand side, and click on Reports.
  • 00:20 We're then going to find the accounts payable aging summary.
  • 00:23 In this case, I'm just going to search for it.
  • 00:25 So, accounts payable aging summary.
  • 00:29 We're going to look at the list of accounts payable or
  • 00:32 vendors we owe money to.
  • 00:34 In this case, we have the vendor listed, Amazing Armchairs.
  • 00:37 We know from working through this series,
  • 00:40 that we have a lot more vendors than just that.
  • 00:43 So, when we look at Amazing Armchairs, and we see they have a 0 balance due,
  • 00:47 that means that we've messed something up in our QuickBooks.
  • 00:50 At some point we've entered a bill, and we've issued money, but
  • 00:54 the money we've issued and the bill are not connected.
  • 00:58 To verify this, we can click on the $0 to the right, and
  • 01:02 we can see there's a bill payment and a bill.
  • 01:05 When we look at the bill payment, we don't see that it's linked up to any bill.
  • 01:12 When we look at the bill itself, we don't see that it's linked up to a bill payment.
  • 01:18 Over here, in the upper right hand corner, we show a balance due.
  • 01:22 Let me take you over to the vendors.
  • 01:26 I'm going to open Amazing Armchairs.
  • 01:29 What I can see in the STATUS column, is that this bill payment of
  • 01:34 499 is currently unapplied, and the bill of 499 is open.
  • 01:38 You don't need to go through all these steps to verify.
  • 01:41 I'm just showing you different ways that you can go about and see,
  • 01:46 that bill is open and that payment which should be connected just isn't connected.
  • 01:50 The way to fix it, just like we did for the customers,
  • 01:54 is to click on the bill payment, or the customer case, the receipt of payment.
  • 01:58 When I click on the Bill Payment, QuickBooks brings up this screen.
  • 02:02 And it gives me a chance to say, okay, I've given money,
  • 02:05 the money is clear at the bank, everything is good about the money, but
  • 02:08 I need to connect it to the bill.
  • 02:10 Over to the right, in this slide out drawer,
  • 02:13 I can see it says Add to Bill Payment.
  • 02:15 I can add the bill of 499 and connect it to the bill payment.
  • 02:21 I'm going to do this by clicking Add, on the right.
  • 02:25 Now I can see that I've applied the 499 to the bill, dated on 7/15.
  • 02:31 In the lower right hand corner, I'm going to click Save and Close.
  • 02:36 When I look at Amazing Armchairs, if I look at the STATUS,
  • 02:41 I no longer see any sort of open, or unapplied, or any of that.
  • 02:46 I can also verify by going into the accounts payable aging.
  • 02:52 Go to aging summary, and I don't see Amazing Armchairs here, either.
  • 02:56 If you're not using bill or bill payment, no problem,
  • 02:59 you don't need to worry about this.
  • 03:01 If you are using bill and bill payment, then I definitely encourage you to look
  • 03:05 at your AP aging summary and just verify that everything feels accurate.
  • 03:09 Quick side note, this is available in the Essentials, Plus, and
  • 03:13 Advanced edition of QuickBooks Online.
  • 03:16 This is not available in Simple Start.

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