How to Pay Bills for Vendors in QuickBooks 2019
Watch QuickBooks 2019 video tutorial. In this lesson, you will learn how to pay bills for vendors in the right way. So, your reports will turn out accurately.
Welcome back! We are working in module five where we’re talking about working with vendors. We are all the way down now to section three, Paying Bills.
I want to go through and show you once you’ve entered the bills in QuickBooks that you owe. How do you go through and properly pay bills in QuickBooks?
Let’s flip over and I’ll show you how.
We’re currently looking at the Unpaid Bills Detail report. If you look down this list, you’ll see here’s Pelican Building Materials. This is the bill we just entered for $125. Once we pay this, it’s going to disappear from this report because it will no longer be unpaid.
I’m going back to the Home screen. I want you to follow the flowchart when you do this. We’ve entered the bill and now I want you to come over to Pay Bills.
Now, before I click on that, I want to mention something that I see quite often. Often what happens is when people are ready to pay a bill they would just go down and either write a check or put it in their check register.
What happens when you do that is you’re leaving the bill unpaid as far as QuickBooks is concerned. It won’t know there’s an association between the bill you entered and the check you’re writing.
You want to make sure you follow the flowchart all the way through and pay your bills right here. Once you’re finished on this screen, it will dump it into the register for you.
Let me show you how this works.
This is a list of all the bills that you still owe, even if you owe a penny. There are different ways to look at this list. Right now, I’m showing all of the bills. But notice, I could look at only the ones due before a certain date (if that’s what I wanted).
I could also filter these. I might be looking for just bills from Cal Gas & Electric, for example. It could be also that I’d like to sort these and I don’t want to sort them by the vendor.
Maybe I want to sort them by the discount used or by the due date. Usually, the vendor is the best way to sort them though because then they’re alphabetical by the vendor.
Basically, what you’re going to do is go down the list and check off any of the bills you’d like to pay. Here’s the Pelican Building Materials. Notice, when I check it off it assumes, if I go all the way over to the right, I’m paying the entire $125.
If you’re not paying that amount, then you type in the amount you are going to pay and it will remember the rest. Let’s say, I’m going to pay $100 on it in this particular case. If you had multiple bills you were going to pay, you can check them all at the same time. Then, go down to the bottom where it says Pay Selected Bills.
But let’s do them one at a time so you can see how this works.
One place in QuickBooks you cannot go to something if you see it on the screen is in this case. For example, I cannot double click Pelican Building Materials and go to that bill. That’s why, they have this Go To Bill option right here, which would take me to that bill and I can make any changes I wanted.
Then, Save & Close at the bottom.
The next thing you’ll notice is a place where you can set the discount. If you’ve decided that the terms in this particular case are 2% 10 net 30, for example, then you can come in here. Type the amount of the discount you’re going to take and which account you set up in the Chart of Accounts to track those discounts.
Here is where I would set any credits. If I had entered a credit memo, then I could go ahead and choose Set Credits and what would happen is, if there were any credits available for this vendor that I’m clicked on, they would be in this list. I could check off the one I’d like to apply that particular credit to.
Underneath that, you have the Payment Date. I’m going to say that this one is January the 12th. The payment method Am I paying this with a check, credit card or online bank pay. I also have the ability to choose To Be Printed.
Meaning that I’m going to go ahead and pay several of these and put the checks in the printer and print them all at once or I can choose to Assign Check Number, which is the one you would do if it was electronically drafted, or you don’t want to go through the whole print process later.
This is the bank account the money is going to come out of, so make sure you have the correct account. That’s really all you do.
I’m going to click on Pay Selected Bills and if I had chosen this Assign Check Number option it gives me a chance to put something in that check number field.
Now, I don’t have to, but it could be that. I put in the word Debit, for example. It will hold whatever you’d like to put in there.
And then, you click OK and now it says that that particular bill is paid. Do you want to pay more bills or are you done? I’ll just say Done for now and that particular bill is paid.
Now a couple of things I want to show you. I’m going to go back to the Unpaid Bills Detail report and I want you to notice if we look at Pelican Building Materials that there’s only $25 that hasn’t been paid yet. Once I pay that it will disappear from this particular report.
The other thing I want to show you is the checkbook. If I go back to the Home screen, we have the ability to go to the check register over here.
If I open the Check Register, I’m going to see the check that we just wrote right here. You’ll see! It says, Pelican Building Materials and $100.
If it says Bill Payment right here, that means you did it the right way. You had a bill and you went through the Pay Bills feature. If it just said Check, right here.
Then, that’s how you would know you did not do it correctly and it didn’t have an association between the payment that you made and the bill.
We’re going to be talking about the register a little bit later. So, I’ll tell you more about that, but right now let’s go back to the Home screen.
We’ve got one more thing to talk about and that is the credit memos. I want to show you how to go ahead and create one, and apply it to that bill.
Cindy McGuckin
Cindy McGuckin is an IT trainer with over 20 years of experience. Cindy currently manages the IT Training Department at Trident Technical College, she's a Member of the Association of IT Professionals, Charleston, SC chapter and the Treasurer of the South Carolina Association of Continuing Higher Education. Cindy is a Microsoft Office and QuickBooks expert and her online courses have received hundreds of 5-star reviews. Her no-nonsense approach to teaching complicated topics makes her classes engaging and interesting.