Don't Let People Waste Your Time Doing Their Bookkeeping
When dealing with suppliers who don’t have their accounting act together.
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PrintWhen dealing with suppliers who don’t quite have their accounting act together, you might be required to do a little accounting for them. When you write checks instead of entering their bills for future payment this can be a problem. Bill pay is the solution…
I just personally went through this experience and have helped clients sort through this issue with suppliers who don’t have good accounting records. They call you up asking about bills you have already paid or send you erroneous statements. If you have simply used "Write Checks" to pay them, here's all you have to work from.
You wind up having to manually reconcile your checks against their invoices, often just to prove to them their latest statement, usually saying you owe more money, is incorrect. This is an unnecessary waste of your time solving a problem they created.
If, on the other hand, you "Enter Bills" for future payment and then use "Pay Bills" to cut your checks. You can just send them a report or two and let them reconcile their own accounts. The report below is a “Vendor Balance Detail” is sorted by date, showing the history of bills and payments. It can also be sorted by transaction type, grouping the bills together and the payments together.
If your supplier wants to know which invoices were paid by each check, you can send them the “Check Detail” report, which is available from the QuickBooks menu options “Reports/Banking/Check Detail”
You can email these reports, as Adobe PDF attachments, directly from the QuickBooks report display. Don’t let people waste YOUR time doing THEIR bookkeeping. Send them these QuickBooks reports and let them figure it out.
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
