How to Enter Bills for Vendors in QuickBooks 2019
Watch QuickBooks 2019 video tutorial. In this lesson, you will learn how to enter bills properly. We will also show you the different menus available in Bill window screen and how to pull out reports from the Home screen.
Welcome back. We are working in module five now where we’re talking about working with vendors. This is section two, Entering Bills.
A lot of people actually take their bills and they just stack them on their desk and when Friday comes they just go through the stack and decide which bills they’d like to pay.
That’s not wrong as far as QuickBooks is concerned. But the ideal way to handle this is to go ahead and put all of your bills that you know you’re going to owe in QuickBooks. That way you can run reports and see who you owe. How much are over 30 days, and so forth.
So let me show you how to go ahead and enter your bills in QuickBooks.
The way you’re going to enter bills in QuickBooks is you’re going to choose this Enter Bills option right here from your Home screen.
The first thing that QuickBooks wants to know is this a bill or did your vendor issue you a credit. The next thing it asks you is who is your vendor.
I can start typing the first few characters or I can pull from the list and pick my vendor from the dropdown. You’ll notice that once you’ve actually put in your vendor name, it will populate the address for you. Also, if the terms were set up in the vendor set up, then it would pull those as well.
You’ll notice with the terms that over here. You have the date of the bill and you have the bill due date. This due date right now will be 30 days automatically from this date.
If I happen to change this to net 15 for some reason, then the two become 15 days apart. I’m going to go ahead and put it back on net 30. Let’s talk for a minute about the date.
This is the date that actually appears on the bill. This is not the date you decided to put it in QuickBooks or you decided to go to the mailbox. It’s the date that’s actually on that bill! Because you want the due dates to actually be accurate.
Now, if you happen to look at your bill and it says that this bill is due on the 15th, for example, you want to make sure that that is correct.
The reference number field is there for you to put in the bill number. Then, you have a place to put in the total amount that’s due. You also have a place to put the memo right here. That could be your account number or anything you’d like to say about this particular bill.
You have a tab for the expenses and a tab for items. And when you’re pulling from the dropdown list here, you want to make sure the two tabs equal the total amount due to the penny, or it will not let you save it.
You don’t have to pick from both tabs. You could pick everything from one tab if you’d like. The Expenses tab is your Chart of Accounts.
If this was something like the electric bill, for example, then this would all go to utilities all the way down at the bottom here, and it would probably have to do with your electricity.
But let’s say in this case, it is job materials. So, we’ll go back up to our cost of goods sold and we’ll find job materials. Let’s say that $100 of this is job materials. You do have a place for the memo and this has to do with this particular line.
Then notice over here you have a place to put in the customer and the job. If you were doing job costing at your business, you will want to choose this as often as possible to make sure that your job costing is correct.
The other thing I want you to notice, there is a little checkbox. If this is checked, that means this is billable. What that means is, if you remember when we looked at invoices there was an option there to pull in any expenses that we wanted to pull into the invoice and turn around and invoice the customer for.
This would be one of those expenses it remembers and we would be able to pull in. If you’re using the class feature make sure you choose the correct class.
Now, I could keep adding additional lines from the Expenses tab. But let’s say the rest of this happens to be under the Items tab. And remember the items, this is where we picked on the estimates.
We had chosen framing and we had chosen the exterior wood door. Let’s just say that in this particular case we want to go ahead and make the other $25 framing.
Then, we could choose one of these. We could say the cost was $25 if we wanted to type over this. We would choose the customer and the job, as long as it pertains to this.
Then, if we don’t want it to be billable we can uncheck that. I’ll go ahead and make sure I choose my class again.
That’s pretty much how you fill out a bill.
Now, let’s see if there is anything on our tabs up here that you need to be aware of. A lot of this you already know. So, we won’t look through those again. But, you haven’t seen select PO yet.
We’re going to be working with purchase orders over in module six and this would be a way that you could go in and actually select a purchase order or a different one if you had pulled one in originally, you can enter the time.
You can also work with the splits. The splits basically mean in this case, we have some of the money split between the Expenses tab and some split between the Items tab. I can clear that and start over. I could also have it recalculate everything for me.
The last button that you see here is the Pay Bills button. If I’m ready to actually pay this bill, I could click there. But, chances are I’m not going to be on this screen when I’m ready to pay this bill.
Under the Reports tab, there are a few things you need to know. These are going to be a lot of your reports that pertain to bills. For example, get familiar with the unpaid bills detail because these are the ones that are not paid.
Also, get familiar with the transaction history. At some point, I may want to look at this bill and go and see where the payment is that this bill was paid with. There might be some other things I want to see in that history.
That’s pretty much all there is as far as bills are concerned. I’m going to go ahead and Save & Close.
If you have changed any of the terms, for example, as I did earlier. I changed this to net 15 and then back to 30. It recognizes that and it’s asking me would I like to change these permanently in their record. I’ll go ahead and just say, “Yes”, for now.
Now, that particular bill has been entered. Let me go and pull up that same report again that shows the unpaid bill so that you can see that this has been entered.
I’m just going to do it a different way. I’m going to go up to Reports on the menu. I’m going down to Vendors & Payables. You’ll notice here is Unpaid Bills Detail.
Now, what’s going to show up here are all the bills that have not been paid, even if there’s a penny left. If you happen to think there should be one here. You don’t see it always check your dates.
This goes through December 15th, if I had dated the one we did for December 20th, for example, it would not show up on the list until I changed that date.
That’s really all there is to working with bills. I want to go ahead and go over to section three now and show you how to pay those bills.
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.
