QuickBooks Basics - Accounts Payable

welcome to James II George pcs quick QuickBooks basics Accounts Payable training and so today I'll be walking you through some of the basics and Accounts Payable writing checks and then also addressing some common errors and ways to correct issues with the accounts payable so the first place that we're going to start is the vendor Center so when you open up QuickBooks up top you'll have your menu and you'll click on vendors and it will take you to your vendor Center so the vendor Center is where all the information about your vendors is summarized um you'll see here's a list of all of your active vendors if you click on any of them right here it'll take you to the company name the contact person address and then down here it'll also summarize any information that we have about the vendor so within QuickBooks you can record payments for products and services at the time by either paying with cash checks or credit cards so all of these transactions do not use accounts payable um but you can also use within QuickBooks the accounts payable features to track and manage bills to defer payments for purchases so in this lesson we're going to talk about how to use the payables function and then a couple of ways to not use the payables function but first I'll delve a little bit more into the basics of sort of the vendor Center and what else you can do so again I kind of talked about what lives on these screens but you can also if you right-click you can edit vendor information to update you know any addresses if you have contact information just any sort of pertinent things to summarize from the invoice back into QuickBooks so it's very handy to have all of this information within QuickBooks because when you go to cut checks or print anything regarding vendors quick books will know to print this address information onto the check so it saves a lot of time in terms of processing if you take that step upfront to put it within QuickBooks so next we're going to talk about just some of the basics of inputting accounts payable so the first thing is how to enter bills within QuickBooks and there's a couple of different ways to do this and I'll show you both ways none of which are wrong just within QuickBooks it allows you to do the same thing in multiple different ways so up top again if you click vendors you'll have sort of all of your vendor functions and then if you hit enter bills it will take you to another window where that sort of looks like an invoice where you enter the bill in QuickBooks so QuickBooks makes this very easy and that the information that you see on an invoice that comes from a vendor you're just going to populate into this window right here so in this example we are going to use the bank of any city as our vendor they sent us an invoice and said hey you owe us money please pay us by a certain date and the default date for this example in QuickBooks is December 15th 2020 and so we'll put that as today's date and that's today of the invoice next is the reference number so for the reference number you will want this to be the invoice number that the vendor gives you so if every time they send you an invoice they give you a unique invoice number I would definitely input that into this area right here that way if a vendor sends you multiple invoices you can keep track of them one by one so let's say the vendors invoice number is one two three four five so we'll just input that there next you'll want to put the amount due so if the vendor says that they are owed five hundred eighty five dollars that's what you'll want to put right here so we'll put five hundred eighty five dollars next is the bill due date this is very important I think to put into QuickBooks just because QuickBooks does have a way of keeping track of the days that your bills are due so for example if you're tight on cash and you only want to pay certain vendors it's helpful to know whose bills are due tomorrow versus whose can I wait until next month so keeping this matching what the vendor invoice says is very important so let's say our invoice is due on the 28th and later on in the training I'll show you how to pull different reports that sort the vendor bills by due date and everything like that and you can also pre populate the terms of the bill here so for example if every single time the vendor sends you an invoice it's due within 15 days you can say its net 15 net 30 if it's 30 days and so on the great part about that feature is in QuickBooks if you pre populate this it will do the math and automatically put in the bill due date so it's one little shortcut that you can take when entering invoices to make it just a little bit quicker so next we'll go over the memos within the bill inputting function so if you look on the screen you'll see that there's two different spots to input memos you have the first one within the bill part and then another one down below now while they may look the same they actually serve two separate purposes so the one up top is actually anything you write here when you print the check to send it to the vendor the vendor will actually see this memo so what I recommend people to do is if the vendor gives you an account number or some sort of specific identifier that you want the vendor to see definitely put that here because when you print out the check it will populate here so for example if our account number with Bank of any city is 2 3 4 we'll put that here again that way when the cheque prints the cheque will have account 2 3 4 and when we send the cheque knows who it's for so then once you've input all this information above you'll want to go down to this lower section here and I would think anything in the expenses and below think of this as the information that's sort of within QuickBooks for your own internal purposes so the first thing you want to input is the account that this bill is for so you know if it's a bill to Staples your account is going to probably be office supplies in this case it's a bill to our bank for let's say alone so our expense is going to be the interest that we owe on our loan with the bank we're just paying an interest only portion of this time so 100% is going to go to that interest expense or five hundred eighty five dollars the next piece to input is the memo so on this memo as I said earlier this is sort of internal for us to know in the company so here you don't have to duplicate this account two three four because we already have that data and we can already search for it so I would put something in this line that's useful for you to know internally so let's say this is the interest payment on the on the December twenty twenty invoice if that's something that's helpful to you then you can put that in the memo it's not required to put something there but I would recommend it just so that when you go back you don't necessarily have to pull the original invoice you can just take a look at this so that is in putting a bill in QuickBooks now one thing I would like to add is that when you look up here on the top left most times with invoices you will be inputting a bill due to someone however on the rare occasion that a vendor does send you a credit meaning you may have returned something and they're giving you money back or there was an error in pricing and again they're giving you money back you can't hit this credit button and what that will do is it will allow you to input money that the vendor is giving you back into QuickBooks so you can keep track of all the money that you owe them less any credits that they've given you so that way you don't need to manually keep track of you know how much less do I have to write a vendor you can just keep track of it all in QuickBooks so it's a great sort of management tool for how much you owe vendors so once you have all of the data input into QuickBooks on this screen you can either hit save and new and it will open up a new bill window for you to UM write an invoice due to another vendor or you can hit save and close and as you see it will take you back to the window that we were before and again if we go back to the vendor we were working with the bank of any city our total balance due is now five hundred eighty five dollars because here we've been put that bill December 15th 2020 on this day so again QuickBooks is keeping track of all these invoices that we've entered so the next step after you've input all the bills that have come in the mail and put them into QuickBooks it's time to actually pay these vendors so we're going to talk about how to pay any open invoices that you see here in the under window so again if you go up top to the vendor button where all of your sort of vendor related tasks will live you will see the pay bills button so if you click on this it will take you to another window this window summarises any and all bills that have been entered and that are currently due to different vendors again as you'll see here from our example earlier Bank of any city shows up with that invoice reference number one two three four five we owe them five hundred eighty five dollars and it also tells you the day that it's due and it looks like we've previously entered some vendor invoices here so now we just have to decide you know either based on cash or when things are due who do we want to pay today additionally as I was talking about earlier with the credits available if you click on a specific vendor and go down to about the middle section you'll see discount and credit information for highlighted bill it'll tell you the vendor name think of any city and also if you have input any credits it will say oh you have one credit available in this example there are zero and it will also say how much in credits you have available which is a very useful tool again for sort of keeping track of everything together that way you're not overpaying vendors for whom have they have issued you credits so you can kind of keep all that information together so for today's example we'd like to pay the bank of any city because their bill is coming due and let's also pay Connor garden supplies because we've recently made a purchase from them so as you see as I'm going through and clicking which vendors I want to pay on the right hand side over here the amount to pay it's starting to total up the total number of vendors that I've selected to pay and again that's sort of a great tool that QuickBooks has in place to double check the amount that I want to pay vendors is it matching up with how much cash I have available to pay vendors so instead of sort of writing it down on the side and keeping track of it QuickBooks is very handy in that it'll total it for you and you can even uncheck someone and say oh I don't have the money to pay them today let me uncheck them and see if the number works now so once you've decided which vendors you'd like to pay today at the bottom of the screen is the payment section and this is the spot where you will write first what day are you paying the bills is it today that it actually happened yesterday stuff like that most times if you're keeping up with the accounts payable everything will occur as of today so again our default in our sample file is December 15th 2020 so that is the date that we will use and the next is the method that we're paying again if we are using the accounts payable function to later write checks most times your method is going to be a check so we'll leave that checked as that and then the third piece to fill out is are we going to print these checks later or have we already wrote the checks to these vendors and we just need to assign the check number so an example of this would be if you knew you out talmy insurance and someone manly wrote a check to town the insurance and now we're just recording it after the fact this is when you would assign a check number but if you haven't paid any of the bills and you're just getting ready to cut the checks from the system then most likely you will be using this to be printed button which again is the default and then the last piece with paying the bills is you'll want to tell QuickBooks which account am i cutting the checks from is it our checking account is it our savings account also if you have multiple checking accounts this is very useful for switching between the two and again your default will typically typically be the one that you're cutting checks out of so in this case it is the checking account so once you've double-checked that all of this information is correct you'll hit this blue button down here that says pay selected bills and then what will happen is QuickBooks from the bills that you've selected to pay it will pop up this payment summary so the payment summary just says these are the items that you want it to pay right now do you want to pay more bills prints the checks of the bills that you said you wanted to pay or are you all set for now you can hit print checks and it will automatically take you to that window but I'm actually going to hit done and show you a second way that you can go back and print your checks but again if you wanted to print them right now you can click this button so for now I'm going to hit the done button and show you how to get back to that window so if we go up to the top left again to our top bar all of your printing functions live under file and then print forms so when I go under print forms you'll see we have a bunch of different options here and in this case we want to print checks so I'm going to say print forms checks and then it will take me to that same window that it gave me the option to go to earlier now in this case you see that there's more than just the two checks that we had selected earlier because in this sample file it had pre-selected some checks to be printed and so we also see those here so what happens in QuickBooks is when you select the checks to be printed they populate into this window until they've actually been printed so what this means is is that someone has previously selected these items to be printed and no one's actually printed them to a check yet so again this is a good sort of management solution to see these are the bills that we said we want it to pay did we actually cut the checks yet let's go to this window to see if that happened so again in this area in the Select checks to print we have the different bank accounts so if you have multiple checking accounts you can toggle between the two to see if there's any checks to be printed in the other accounts you'll see in the cash expenditures there are no checks to be printed because we haven't told QuickBooks to print any checks from that account so if I go back and hit checking I can see what needs to be printed another good feature in QuickBooks is this first check number so over time as you use QuickBooks to print checks from it will also keep track of the check numbers that you're using so right now no checks have been printed so it just thinks that the default first check is number one but if you were continuously using checks it would know to say you know the last check that you used is one thousand forty nine the next ejected in the series is 1050 I'm going to assume that that's going to be your starting point now if no one else has gone in and grabbed a check from the folder to write a check with and this will most likely be correct so what I would recommend before actually cutting checks is go to your filing cabinet grab the checks that you're actually going to be printing with and double check at the first number in your check series actually matches what QuickBooks is saying so in this case QuickBooks is saying I think your next check is 1050 double check that the check in front of you is actually 1050 if it's not then change it to what it should be let's say someone grabbed one check to write a manual check with and we just haven't recorded that in QuickBooks yet so then we would change it to the current one of 1051 so next we want to select which checks we actually want to print most times if you're just selecting bills for what you actually want to pay checks with you're going to select all of them but if for whatever reason you just need to print one check at this time you can change which bills you currently want paid a quick way of doing this is over here you'll see a select all and select none if you hit select none you'll see it uncheck everything and it will say there are no checks to print and if you scroll down it confirms that that is the case alternatively if you want to print all the checks that are in your queue you can hit select all and again you'll see when I hit select all it selects every single one and again gives you another total to double-check so I'm going to again hit select none and I'm just going to print these first two checks once you've confirmed that these are the checks you want to pay hit OK what this will do is it will then take you to your print screen where you will select the printer that you want to use to cut the checks with also it will ask you what style of checks are you cutting so you have the voucher style which it has the check at the top and then two spots at the bottom one for the vendor and one for yourself summarizing the check information and the bills that were paid we also have the standard which is three checks all in a row and then the wallet style and again in here if you're using something like a bypass tray or maybe a different tray to put your checks in just make sure that everything is set up correctly in your options so here you know is the orientation correct and all that good stuff typically when you change the settings to print check in QuickBooks the first time it'll remember it for future times but at least here we have to use a bypass tray so I always double check that it is using the correct trade to print everything from because you don't want to accidentally print something else and then have to go back and fix it so that is it for printing checks if you were actually printing them you would hit print I am going to cancel out of this and you'll see it knew that I didn't print the checks but if we did print them it would continue with that okay so that is the basics of inputting Accounts Payable and paying bills the next piece that I'm going to talk about is dealing with some of the unusual instances in QuickBooks so what happens when something goes wrong and how do I fix it so the first one and probably one of the most common things is someone will input a bill to be paid in QuickBooks and then for one reason or another it gets paid not within the pay bills function so it's withdrawn via EFT someone pays the bill via debit card or maybe someone writes a manual check for it because the bill needs to be paid as soon as possible so there is a way in QuickBooks to clear off the open bill while still inputting that the bill was paid so in this example we have here Cal Gas and Electric for one hundred thirty seven dollars and fifty cents let's say that you know someone paid this via debit card and now we need to record that payment and clear this off because we don't want to accidentally pay Cal Gas and Electric twice so let's say that this was done via EFT so to do this we're going to revert back to sort of the standard way of just writing checks out of QuickBooks so to write a check out of QuickBooks you'll go back to your top panel up here and we'll go under banking because writing checks is considered a banking function and then we'll hit write checks so this here will take you to your write checks window and again much like the entering bills window this looks a lot like a cheque so what you'll do is input the data that you see on the already written check into this window again a lot of this is very standard first you'll want to select which bank account is it coming from ah and actually QuickBooks has already pre-populated this so it knew that I was clicking on Cal Gas and Electric and when I tried to write a manual check and not use the pay bills function it's giving me this morning open bills exist warning and it's saying you're trying to write a check right now but there's an open invoice are you sure you want to keep going with this because if you do it this way there's a possibility that the two won't match up so that is a great function in QuickBooks again in terms of keeping track of your open bills and making sure that things aren't paid twice and not being applied to one another I'm going to say continue writing Chuck because I'm going to show you how you apply this check to that invoice so again we want to say what account did we cut the check out of it was our checking account um next we would put the check number if there was a check number in this case I'm going to say it was an EFT so we'll put EFT and then next we want to say what Dave did the EFT come out of our system we'll say it came out December 17 and again it was paid to Cal Gas & Electric and how much was the EFT for 13750 again in this memo field much like a enter bills field the top part is what was written on the actual check so if there was some sort of memo with the EFT notice you can put that their account number anything like that the bottom portion once again think of this as the internal QuickBooks information so the account what expense account or other account should it go to how much is it for and what is our internal memo so for the account the error that most people make in this step is that oh there was an EFT to Cal Gas and Electric it was for yes it must be it was nifty for that and that is where the errors occur in that if you cut a check and they it's for gas and electric and then enter a bill and say it's for gas and electric you've actually input the expense twice which is overstating your expenses and it still says that you owe asked Cal gas and electric for that old amount so the correct way to write a check and to apply it to an open invoice is not to use the expense account the second time you actually want to say that it was for accounts payable the reason is is that this check was used to pay and open accounts payable item which is already in the system so you'll want to tell QuickBooks please put it against accounts payable and for the full amount and again here you can write an internal memo if you need to know some more details on the check now the last piece which QuickBooks will require you to do if you try to save in clothes or what you should do is ah and if quickbooks actually automatically did it which is great so what you have to do is unfortunately if you say Cal Gas and Electric here QuickBooks won't necessarily know to apply it so you also have to write the vendor name here that's because unfortunately QuickBooks isn't quite smart enough to know that if you write it here at the Accounts Payable was actually paying that it looks like here it actually did pre-populated it which is great in some of the older versions it doesn't do that but still definitely double-check that you're applying it to that vendor here so once that is all set we'll hit save and close and if we go back to our vendor Center we'll see our balance for Cal Gas and Electric is $0 because we don't owe them anything we had a bill and then we paid it me a check now one thing about writing a bill and then paying it with a check not within the bill pay function um you'll see here there's two different types of checks that are in the check which we just input and then the bill payment check which comes from that pay bills window QuickBooks will know to apply the balances to zero out but it will still show one balance as the invoice is open and then one check as it needs to be applied to something and I'll show you what I mean right now so if you right click on the Cal gas and electric balance and then go to the bottom open balance this is actually a great quick report to see what invoices are currently open for this vendor you'll see that we have this one open bill and then this one open check which while the balance comes out to zero later on when I show you how to pull the Accounts Payable reports it actually looks off because you'll have all these lines with zero dollar balances so now I'm going to show you how to apply these two together to cancel each other out so again you're going to go back to your vendors pay bills window and you'll see that invoice for Cal Gas and Electric it's still showing open why is that we just got a check for it well if we click it to pay it and again as I was talking about earlier if we go to the bottom to see if there's any credits there is actually a credit to apply to it because we cut a check for it so if we hit the set credits it'll say ok on this day you wrote an EFT to Cal Gas and Electric for this much do you want to use this amount yes we do so if you hit done you'll see over here our amount due was 13750 and our credit youth was 13750 so our amount to pay is actually zero and again we are cutting zero dollars worth of checks because we've only used credits to pay for our bills and then over here to finish this process we will need to say the date of the payment happened which is December 17th and it was done via check it will stay to be printed but again because this amount to pay $0 it won't actually print any checks so don't worry about that so once you're all set with this area down here you'll hit pay selected bills and again it will pop this up as saying Oh payment was successful for these items but as you'll see below here it will not give you an option to cut checks again because the total was zero it knows that a check does not need to be written for that so if I hit done you'll see that our vendor open balance report that I had open earlier that showed the bills in the open check is now cleared out because we've told QuickBooks please match this check up with this bill since one paid the other so that's great that cleans it up and again if we go back to the vendor Center we'll see here that our balance for Cal Gas & Electric is $0 so we don't owe them anything else so that is how to apply checks EF T's and debit card transactions to open bills next I'll talk a little bit about different ways that you can enter expenses into QuickBooks now more and more these days one of the most common things is credit cards what is the best way for me to enter all of these credit card charges into QuickBooks well there's actually two different ways you can do so the second way that I'm going to show you is highly recommended the first way you can definitely use but I'll tell you a little bit about the setbacks of using the first method versus the second method so for the first method we are going to stay within this vendor center here and the way that you do it is you input the entire credit card bill as a bill in QuickBooks and I'll show you what that means so let's assume that we have a credit card with Bank of any city and I'll also show you that second way to enter bills in QuickBooks so remember the first way we used vendors enter bills the second way that you can do it is actually if you click on a vendor here right click you can also hit enter bills and if you look down here you'll see a lot of these options are the same as the vendor tab above the advantage with doing it this way is when you hit enter bills it knows that you mean you want to enter a bill for bank of any city since you were clicking on that one again both ways are correct it's just a matter of preference at this point which way you want to do it so we're back to this enter bills window and again you're going to want to enter the same information what date was the credit card bill for you know is there an invoice number that they gave you how much is the total credit card bill for for the total amount do I would recommend not putting the minimum amount due but the total amount charged during the month so let's say it was $5,000 it was a very busy month of activity for us and then you'll want to put the due date on the credit card again to keep track of those due dates and make sure that nothing is being paid late in the system and again in the memo here I would highly recommend putting the organization's account number so that way when the cheque is cut and mailed to the bank they know which account to apply it to so that's all the information that comes on the invoice and again the next part down here is our internal tracking system so if you do choose this method of inputting credit cards into QuickBooks what you'll do is for every single line item here every single separate charge you'll want to have as a separate line item and I'll go through a couple of examples with you now so let's say we ordered some office supplies from Staples so we ordered our expenses office supplies and the credit card charge was 102 dollars for office supplies so in the memo you'll want to write staples so that way you know who the vendor is for and then next we actually purchase some more office supplies except it was the next day and it was from WB Mason for 2650 so again we'll put our expenses office supplies email 26:50 and our memo WB Mason and then again maybe we have to go back and buy some more supplies from Staples but this time park we're computer supplies and in part we're office supplies so we bought some stuff for computer repairs $80 of the $100 transaction was for computer repairs and then the second piece is again just generic office supplies that we purchased so I'm just taking in all of the pertinent information to the receipt here and you would continue going on with this until your total of expenses here matched the total amount to up here now if you're an organization that has a lot of credit-card activity every single month which warren more now that's becoming the norm this can become quite cumbersome a because you have to input every single vendor as a separate line item and furthermore in this case of staples here if you have one receipt where it needs to be applied to multiple different expenses you have to start splitting up these expenses and then going back and trying to keep track of what's already been input versus hasn't can become a little bit of a nightmare the second part to this is that you don't get as much ability to data mine by doing it this way because as you'll see here the date that were inputting all of these credit card charges on is the day that the statement was done December 20th uh credit card statements go over the course of the month so some of these for example this staples bill here could have been from the end of November and by doing it this way you have no way of knowing was this staples purchase from November was it from December so again if you have a lot of transactions throughout the year I would not recommend using this method but if you're an organization that has a handful of credit card transactions this may not be a bad method for you to use especially if you're not too concerned with the details so the choice is up to you but again I would highly recommend the second method which I will show you now so I am actually going to clear this data since we haven't finished inputting all of the expenses and this is also a useful tip if you start a bill and you want to scrap it and start later or start from scratch on the bottom right hand corner here if you pick clear it'll just clear everything as if you hadn't input anything definitely use with caution make sure you actually want to do it but in cases like this where I'm just showing an example it's a great way of just kind of quickly clearing everything off so we don't save a sort of in progress or transaction that doesn't balance which by the way QuickBooks will not let you do which is a good thing it sort of keeps itself in check so now I will show you the second method of inputting credit card transactions into QuickBooks so if you go under the banking tab here because QuickBooks considered credit cards a banking function on the third one down it will say enter credit card charges if you click that it will take you to another window which sort of looks like a receipt so the difference here is that QuickBooks will ask you ok credit cards you have these credit cards set up in QuickBooks which one do you want to use to input charges for so in this case we'll say it's our Cal oil credit card and then it says is this a purchase that you made or did you return something and it's a credit on to your party cards even which again is very handy for keeping track of everything together for this example we'll say it's a purchase so next is where did we buy this item from so we purchased something from Staples again office supplies or favorite thing and we purchased the office supplies on November 30th 2020 again here in the reference number if you want to put something specific like the receipt number or anything you can do that to keep track of it and then you would put the total amount shown on the receipt here so $100 let's say and again on the memo this is sort of what's on the memo of the credit card receipt versus what is the internal memo which is all kept track of down here again as we sort of go through all of these windows you'll see QuickBooks sets up everything in a very similar manner to keep it consistent with what's on the actual versus what we're keeping track of internally which is down here so down here is where you'll break out the expenses so in our example earlier of the hundred dollars part of it was for office supplies and part of it was for computer repairs so our first expense is computer repairs and that's for $80 and let's say we want to say which computer was it for we were repairing our dell inspiron notebook and then next we have to finish and putting the rest of the expenses because $80 doesn't match up to 100 the remainder of our purchases was for office supplies type office supplies here and maybe you want to know that we purchased binder clips again you don't need to put anything in the memo but the more that you put into QuickBooks the more that you'll get out of it when you start pulling reports for them so what as much as you need to sort of data mine I personally like putting more information here just because if I need to look up a transaction later I can do everything within QuickBooks and I don't have to go hunt for that old credit card receipt to say oh we spent $100 on this what did what we exactly buy if you put all the data here you can very easily search for information so once you've input all of your expenses you can either hit save and close to save this and close out of the window or if you need to enter more you can hit save and new and so again maybe next we purchased something from again staples and it was a few days later we needed some more office supplies and it was for $50.00 and you'll notice here that QuickBooks actually learns pretty quickly um if you have the Preferences set up correctly and later on in the seminar I will show you how to edit some of the preferences QuickBooks remember that hey last time you've had a Staples charge you use these two accounts so I'm going to pre populate that for you because I'm guessing that it was probably the same thing and that is wine feature I would highly recommend keeping in QuickBooks is for that for it to remember what the previous transactions were just because again with a lot of vendors such as staples you're probably purchasing office supplies if you're going to shell you're probably purchasing gas if it's your bank it's probably some sort of you know interest expense or bank charges and stuff like that so by having it set up to do this it's actually a big time saver with pre-populating the data now in this case we actually did just purchase office supplies for $50 and that's saying it was just binders and we can put that there so you can either keep this line here or me personally I like to any zero lines I just like to clear off so if you click on this line and you go to edit you'll see that you do have a few different options for editing the transaction that you're in so in this case I'll want to delete that zero line so that just the one with information is there so that is pretty much it for inputting a credit card charge and I'm going to hit save and close and again the second method that I just showed you is definitely the preferred way of inputting transactions one of the last reasons being that with inputting the credit card transactions separately you are able to reconcile the credit card accounts to make sure that all of your transactions are in there and I'll show you what I mean right now so while this training does not cover sort of reconciling bank accounts I will show you how to reconcile the credit card so again if you go to banking reconcile it will take you to all the different accounts that you can reconcile and it is pre-populated to Cal oil card most likely because that is the most recent one we were using um and let's say our statement D that we want to reconcile is November 30th because that's less students that we received and the ending balance on the statement was fifty-three hundred dollars and fifty three hundred dollars also if they charge you when you finance charges you can input that here instead of inputting it as a separate transaction and then if you hit continue it will take you to that reconciliation window so as you're sort of going through a statement and saying okay on this day yes there was a transaction for 2250 we'll click off that the next day there was another one for twenty-five dollars and so on and so you'll keep clicking these off until your difference is zero and you can reconcile it again it's just a great tool to make sure that all of your transactions total up to your credit card statement and that you did next don't they mess up and forget to put one or maybe put two in so it's a good sort of check on yourself so those are the basics of inputting credit-card charges in QuickBooks next I'm going to talk about how to transfer funds between bank accounts so this is actually one of the simplest things to do in QuickBooks and that gives you a separate window to do it um so if you go to banking because it's a banking function and you hit transfer funds it again takes you to another open no where you'll say what day did we transfer the money it will say it was the 10th and where did we transfer the money from so let's say we've been doing really well and we want to take some of our money and put it into our savings account because we don't need it right now so the money came from my checking account and we transferred it to our savings account and let's say we transferred $5,000 because that's what we've determined we don't need so by doing this it's a very quick way of just transferring money from one bank account to another instead of having to go through a more complicated process of writing a check from one account to another QuickBooks just kind of has shortcutted everything and built this window for us which is great and then it will it just gives you a warning um you know is this an online transport or not double check it if it is you'll want to go back and say yes we did do an online funds transfer so we'll do that our writing so that is all about transferring funds now the next piece that I'm going to talk about is voiding checks while it may seem simple voiding checks can cause a lot of problems with prior years if you don't do it correctly so I'm going to go back to our vendor Center and show you a couple of examples avoiding checks um so let's say we have an open check from patio and deck designs which the vendor got back to us and said you know we lost the check can you cut us another one which is perfectly fine so the one big rule I would say with voiding checks and QuickBooks is that only void checks that are in your organization's current fiscal year so if you are a calendaring your end December 31st and you need to avoid a check only do so if it's in 2016 so if you wrote the check on February 5th 2016 and you've determined that for whatever reason it needs to be voided that's fine if it's a check again if you're in 2016 and it's a check from June 2015 don't point the check it will cause issues with QuickBooks the reason being is that QuickBooks does not know what day to void the check it just knows that if let's save a check date was February 5th 2016 and you hit void it will void the check as a February 5th if you go back and say I want to avoid this check from June 30th 2015 and we'll go back to last fiscal year void the check in June 2015 and change last year's numbers which if you're preparing a tax return or have audited financial statements it will cause your QuickBooks file to not match the taxes or the audited financial statements which will become an issue down the road so that's why we say only void checks in the current period and I will show you how to do both um but for now we'll start with the easy part which is the current period so as I said earlier we want to avoid a check from patio and deck designs they said this check number one one to nine oops we lost it can you avoid it and cut us a new one for that open bill sure no problem so we found check number one one to nine that we need to void and if we open up the check here we'll see that it hasn't cleared the bank if it had cleared the bank when we did a reconciliation in QuickBooks it would have been noted here as such so next if we want to avoid it again we'll go to this edit feature here and say void bill payment check and it's very easy once you click this button it'll just void it zero this out zero this out and then we just save and thankfully QuickBooks has heeded the warnings and it will also warn you one more time that you know if you're voiding a check you're still going to owe money for the associated bills and are you sure that you want to do this because QuickBooks is aware that voiding a check can cause ramifications so in this case we are sure because we know we're going to cut another check to the vendor so we'll say yes perfect and then if we go back we'll see that check here is actually it doesn't delete it you don't want to delete anything you just want to point it out so that it goes to zero and now our vendor balance for patio and deck designs is back to 180 to fifty because it knows that this bill here didn't actually get paid because we've awarded it here so next time you go to cut checks you'll just want to include a new check to this vendor to clear up their balance so that is the easy way to void checks in the current fiscal year um in QuickBooks if you do have a check from a prior fiscal year we'll say June 2015 that needs to be voided um the only way really to do it is to create a journal entry in QuickBooks which if you are a non accountant that does sound very scary so if you aren't comfortable with doing journal entries or won't quite remember how definitely just ask your accountant and they can walk you through the process on how to do it I will show you how to do it right now if you are interested in doing so so in this example we want to void a check from talmy ensure Townley insurance last fiscal year and I don't know about the vendor Center you'll notice here is that you can actually sort transactions so in this case it's only showing us transactions from this fiscal year but we can change that to say show me all transactions or I know this check is from last year so please show me that check and so here it is check number one 463 that's the one I want to void so before you do voided check in QuickBooks via journal entry I would collect the relevant information about it so what's the check number check date amount and what was the original expense form so once you have that information you'll want to go to the make journal entries window so if you go to accountant make general journal entries this will take you to the traditional journal entry window with making debits and credits and you'll want to make sure that the date that you void the check is just within your current fiscal year typically I do the journal entry as of the day that I decide to avoid the check um just to make it very easy and then with voiding a check you'll want to know you know which account is it being voided from we write all of our checks from the checking account so we'll select that how much is the check being voided for twelve hundred dollars and in this example when you're voiding checks via journal entry the cash account you'll always debit so that's one sort of cheat sheet to any non accountants out there who want to void checks via journal entry and then in the Menil I like to write as much detail as possible about the check that I'm voiding so I'll write you know what was the original date of the check what was the check number who was the check to and also how much was the check for and I should probably also write that we are doing this entry to avoid the check and then you can also say maybe the reason why you're avoiding it that way when you look in QuickBooks anyone who's it can very quickly no you know this is why we made this entry so that's the first part of it and then the next part is you just have to write which expense it originally went to in this case it was insurance expense and so that other side will be a credit so once you have all of this information and your memo the cheque that you want to void you'll hit save and close now at this stage you're not done with voiding the check again QuickBooks isn't smart enough to know this entry needs to match up to this check that I want to void so what I mean you go at month-end to reconcile you your bank account again it lives under banking reconcile um and you'll want to reconcile your checking account as of let's say your end when you hit continue what you'll need to do to clear both off of the list is you'll need to find the original check that you want to void so here it is check number 1 4 6 3 and then that's one piece of it but you'll also need to find the entry that you just made so here's our journal entry for $1,200 so in this way you're sort of matching up the two transactions I have one cheque for $1,200 and one deposit back to void the cheque for $1,200 thereby zeroing it out it's very important when you do the bank reconciliation to match these two up just because you don't want your bank reconciliation to be running these super old checks and journal entries of stuff you've already voided it just becomes very cumbersome over the years so I would recommend matching the two up just to clear them off for the future and then once you're done reconciling it will just hit reconcile now and they will clear off of this so that is sort of the crash course in how to avoid cheques and QuickBooks regarding bills next I'm going to talk a little about editing those preferences as I mentioned earlier so as you sort of saw as we were going through there's different things that QuickBooks will pre-populate if you use QuickBooks before the B thing and just kind of anything else that you can change in the system so if you have any preferences that you'd like to edit if you go to edit up here and then at the bottom hit preferences you'll see that it'll take you to the Preferences window and the first one we're going to start at is bills and if you look up here you'll see you have two different options you have my preferences which just works under your login and then company preferences which if you have multiple logins for your QuickBooks tile it is going to affect every single user if you just have one user than my preferences and company preferences are one in the same so in this feature here you'll see you know warned me about duplicate bill numbers from the same vendor do you want to automatically use credits things like that the second piece where you can edit some accounts payable preferences is the check-in window so again under my preferences you can set the default that you want checks to come out of pay bills to come out of everything like that if you have multiple accounts where let's say one account you make deposits to and another one you cut checks out of then it may make sense to sort of switch these out but typically just your default checking account is what most people will use and then under company preferences there's just some more things that you can ask what books to do so warning about duplicate check numbers autofill payee account number and check memo that one is also a great one so that every time it just knows to put your account number in there and you don't have to look it up every single time again another great time-saving tool and then the last piece of editing some Accounts Payable preferences as if you go under general under my preferences this is personally one of my favorite areas to edit in that you can control a lot of those automatically recalling information functions here so as I mentioned earlier QuickBooks was pre filling those accounts based on the vendor that I used with the past entries that's because it was already selected as a preference and if you don't have it selected I would highly recommend it again it's another great time-saving tool and here you know do you want workbooks to make when you're recording a transaction do you want the decimal place to automatically be placed and a bunch of other things so I highly recommend sort of going through and playing with the Preferences to sort of suit your needs as you're going to QuickBooks um because you really can sort of tailor make it to your input style all right so those are the preferences the last piece that I'm going to talk about is pulling different accounts payable related reports out of QuickBooks so the most common one for accounts payable reports is the ap aging summary so all of the reports in QuickBooks live under reports and this is a vendor report so we'll go under vendors and payables and we will see AP aging summary so this report is most useful for you've entered a bunch of bills into QuickBooks and you've set them aside and then a couple of days later it's time to cut checks to these vendors this is a very useful report for summarizing who do I owe money to and when do I owe them money again particularly useful if you're trying to manage cash and you can't afford to pay all of your vendors at once you just want to pay the ones that are coming up too so as I mentioned earlier entering that due date becomes very important with this report because QuickBooks will sort your amounts due based on the due dates that you tell it so if you have a bill that's very very old it will come up in like the 61 to 90 days column so that will kind of prompt you to say oh well we should probably pay this ASAP since it's very fast - thankfully in this file everything is pretty current so you get a good sense of you know everything is good so we can wait a little maybe on some of these so this is sort of the standard Accounts Payable report that most people go to another useful report if you want to get into the details of the Accounts Payable a little bit more is the unpaid bills detail so again if you go to reports vendors and payables and unpaid bills detail it'll take you to another report which shows you all of the detail from that other report here so any other report you just saw that $45 total but does that $45 is it three separate bills is it two bills and a credit or is it just one bill so if you're interested in seeing that information that's what's here and as you can see like no one hardware and supplies has two separate bills so you can see that detail here what day was the invoice and also what day is the invoice - which is very important the last report that I'm going to show you is the expenses by vendor summary or vendor detail and that just kind of slices and dices the information a little bit differently so in this case if we go to reports company and financial and then you have your expenses by vendor summary and detail I'll show you the detail you will see here that it takes every single vendor that we've used so far this fiscal year and tells you any check that we're up to them any bill credit card charge everything so this report is getting into the weeds a little bit but again if you need this report to help you prepare since of information or just to get an understanding of you know how often are we using certain vendors who are we using for a lot who are we using for a little bit all of that information is here alternatively if you don't want to see all of the detail you can pull this report in summary so if you go to reports company and financial and then expenses by vendor summary same report it just collapses the detail another great thing with QuickBooks is if you do want to see that detail from this report just double click on it and it will take you to a summary of just that one vendor so that is all that I have for the training if anyone has any questions please feel free to ask them now alright it looks like we have one question Oh nope not a question just a comment all right so it looks like no one has any questions thank you so much for joining us today if you do in the future have any questions please definitely feel free to reach out to me I would love to give you a hand and thank you so much for attending today have a great day everyone

Channel: James A George PC

Views: 90,031

Rating: 4.8782201 out of 5

Keywords: Quickbooks Accounts Payable Tr

Id: em2nzBVWn9c

Length: 65min 19sec (3919 seconds)

Published: Sat Jun 17 2017