What to do when vendors bill for an entire purchase order before the purchase order is complete.

You have issued a purchase order and received some but not all items to be delivered under the purchase order. QuickBooks limits the amount of bills entered against inventory to the total of items received. If you want to pend entering the bill until the purchase order is closed, here is a way to to do it.

Create and memorize a custom transaction detail report filtered for the transaction type, “Item Receipts” with the date range equal to “Today”. An example of that report is shown below. I have limited the columns displayed only to make the report readable in this article.



Run this report each morning and reset the date range you want to check for purchase orders that have been completed; for example items received the previous day or previous weekend.

One at a time, select each item on the report to see the item receipt and select the icon at the bottom of the form, “Show PO” as shown below.



If the purchase order is marked “Received in Full” as shown below, you can now retrieve the vendor bill and select “Enter Bills Against Inventory” and enter the bill to be paid.



Robert Guild is certified QuickBooks ProAdvisor in Austin, TX who conducts CPE courses for CPAs and individual training and group classes to QuickBooks users. His company at www.QBCoach.biz, maintains a sixteen-station QuickBooks lab, providing hands-on training. You can contact him directly at rguild@QBCoach.biz or follow him on twitter at QBPro