Hello chippawaautobody,
Welcome back to the QuickBooks Community! It's great to see that you're still using QuickBooks Online. Based on your question, what @GolferGirl mentions is on the right track to getting this situation with your expenses and payments sorted out, and I'd like to elaborate to ensure that you have all of the information you need.
The key here is considering what type of transaction you initially used to enter the supplier transaction. There are a few different ones to choose from: expenses, cheques, and also bills. The Bills feature is available in QuickBooks Online Essentials and Plus, and gives you the opportunity to enter a supplier transaction that you intend to pay later through the Pay Bills feature. Here's an article that explains each of these in more detail: What is the difference between bills, cheques, and expenses?
It sounds to me like your situation calls for a Bill transaction, which will post the supplier invoice for one date while allowing you to pay it later through Pay Bills, as I mentioned. With what you've described, it sounds like you used the Expense feature instead, which is why you're not seeing the amount in Pay Bills now. An expense transaction is like a sales receipt, meaning the money and the service or product were exchanged at the same time. When you enter an expense, QuickBooks considers the payment already complete.
To right this situation, what I recommend is deleting the expense, then re-entering it as a bill with the relevant date and other information (you can make note of these before deleting the expense if needed). Once you've re-entered the information as a bill, you'll be able to go to the Pay Bills section and see the amount due to make the payment. Here's an article that can help with the bills portion: Enter bills and record bill payments in QuickBooks Online
I hope these answers have helped with getting a sense of what's going on and how to handle the transactions. Don't hesitate to ask more questions if you have them, though.
Have a great weekend.
