Paying your QuickBooks Bills can be easier (even pain free!) – when you use your software to its fullest capacity.
Paying QuickBooks Bills with a Credit Card
Situation 1: You’ve entered a bill into your QuickBooks, and it’s now listed as an outstanding payable. You’ve just determined that some of these QuickBooks Bills were (or will be) paid with a credit card. What do you do?
Company owners and bookkeepers often use credit cards to pay QuickBooks bills.
The motivation may be the ease and convenience of paying by phone or online, the person paying the bill may be at the vendor’s site and wants to pay the bill while there, it may be for security or tracking purposes, and/or to earn bonus points for travel or additional products.
Paying QuickBooks bills with a credit card is a common occurrence – and one that you’ll want to know how to handle.
To record your Credit Card Bill payment:
- Go to the bottom of the Bill Payments screen, and locate the “Method” field.
- Change it from ‘Check’ to ‘Credit Card’.
- Then go to the ‘Account’ field, and choose the credit card account that you’ll be using for payment.
- Select the Bill(s) you want to pay with a credit card.
- Click on the “Pay Selected Bills” button and Shazam(!!) your Bill payment is properly recorded AND your credit card balance is increased.
Just remember! QuickBooks will ‘remember’ that you paid your Bills with that credit card, and the next time you pay Bills – guess what – it will default to the most recent payment ‘Method’ you used.
So if you just paid some QuickBooks Bills via Credit Card, and later choose to pay Bills in your regular way (e.g., to pay the Bills from a checking account), and if you forget to change the “Method” and “Account” fields, you could end up with a lot of payments going against the credit card account. Aaargh! You may find yourself with lots of manual corrections to pull through.
So always check the “Method” field at the bottom of the screen before you hit the “Pay Selected Bills” button.
Paying QuickBooks Bills with a Vendor Credit
Situation 2: It’s time to pay the company bills. You want to be sure that you don’t overlook any outstanding vendor credits that should reduce the amount you pay to a vendor.
Here’s a quick way to make sure that you find – and take – all of the credits you deserve!
- Before paying Bills, review the current status of the bills to pay. My favorite ‘background check’ reports include the
- Accounts Payable Aging Summary,
- Unpaid Bills Detail, and
- Vendor Balance Detail.
…
- When it’s time to actually pay your Bills, and you place a check-mark in the white column for a Bill that you want to pay, if a vendor credit exists, the Set Credits button at the bottom of the screen will transform itself into a ‘clickable’ button:
- You’ll be able to see how many credits exist and the total $ amount available.
- You can then click the button and select the credit(s) that you want to apply to that Bill.
- QuickBooks will apply the credit(s) to the Bill and reduce the amount that shows in the ‘Amount to Pay’ column.
- If at all possible, apply smaller credits against larger bills. Why? When a credit pays the entire bill, the credit will “disappear”.
- For better tracking, apply a smaller credit to a larger bill so the information will show up on the check voucher that goes to the vendor, and makes it easier for them to see how you’ve applied the credits.
These two tips should help you pay all of your QuickBooks Bills more efficiently – regardless of how you choose to pay them.
If this information helped you, check out our affordable QuickBooks subscription training series. If you’d like individual coaching, or have any questions, please give us a call or send us an e-mail today.
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