Have unapplied payments to a supplier and there is no outstanding bill... I tried to create a bill to bring bal to zero but it doesnt work? how do I clear this?

Hey candee,

Making sure everything is balanced is the best way to unlock the full potential of QuickBooks Online's powerful tracking for accounts payable. Every bill and payment you record follows the basic effect in the liability account, and is used for some advanced tracking for the aging of each individual bill. The difference in these two calculations can lead to a discrepancy between your balance sheet and your supplier's balance, which indicates that a bill or payment may be incorrectly linked. I'm here to help, so I'm confident we'll have no problem getting to the bottom of this.

The first step in addressing this is determining the root cause. It sounds like you already have an idea of how things are recorded, and this is a sure-fire way to determine where the discrepancy is occurring. It's just a few easy steps:

1. Head to your Reports tab and select the Balance Sheet.
2. Click on the amount for Accounts Payable and enter today's date.
3. Set the Group by option to Supplier then select Run report.

If the balance here is the same as the balance, there is most likely a missing or duplicate transaction for that supplier. Take a look at their transaction list to make sure everything is recorded properly. If it's 0, we can easily resolve the difference by linking remaining transactions:

1. Click on + New and select Cheque.
2. Select your specific Payee.
3. The right Add to Cheque side bar will display all open transactions affecting the balance. Selecting Add for each one should result in a $0 cheque.
4. Save and close the cheque.

With this, your balance should be consistent between your balance sheet and your supplier page. For additional steps to try, check out this great article: How to get your Aging Reports to match 

Feel free to ask me any additional questions!

I have unapplied payments from a customer. creates a  credit to my customer in a/r  but they do not really have one. when I click on it I cant delete it because it is matched to a bank deposit. why then is it in unapplied status?

Hi accounting126, 

Thanks for joining this thread. The reason that the unapplied payments are in unapplied status is because they haven't been applied to a customer invoice. Once an invoice is created that you can apply that credit balance to, the balance will be removed from your accounts receivable subledger. In order to delete the transaction, it would need to be unmatched from the bank deposit. If this payment was included in a bank deposit with other items, then you'd simply remove that line from the bank deposit in question. If the bank deposit is for that payment alone, then the deposit itself would need to be deleted. Here's how to go about this: 

• From the Dashboard, select the + New button, then select Bank deposit. 
• In the top left corner, click on the clock icon to bring up a list of previous bank deposits. 
• Select the bank deposit related to this unapplied payment. 
• From here, you'll either click the garbage bin icon to the right of the line item if this payment was only one part of the deposit and then Save and close, or you'll click the More button towards the bottom and select Delete if the deposit was solely for the payment. 

The payment will then be unlinked from the bank deposit, allowing you to delete it if necessary. You can learn more about unmatching transactions in the following Community articles: Unmatch downloaded bank transactions or move them to another account

Please don't hesitate to reach out if you have any other questions!