To organise your books, the general recommendation is to maintain one Accounts Receivable (A/R) account and one Accounts Payable (A/P) account.
Your default and only A/R and A/P accounts are the ones that were created when you set up your company in QuickBooks Online, or those you selected during conversion.
However, if you have to group or divide your open payables or receivables, you can do one of the following:
- Set up parent and sub-customers to group your open receivables
- Use location tracking to group payables or receivables
The steps in the following sections guide you through setting up either method.
| Tip If you already have multiple Accounts Receivable or Accounts Payable accounts, consider merging them. |
Set up parent and sub-customers to group your open receivables
One way to group your open receivables is to set up a parent customer for each receivable type you need, and then change your existing customers to sub-customers of the appropriate parent. This allows you to group and sub-total your open receivables by the parent customer.
Step 1: Create a parent customer
To be able to group your open receivables by the parent customer, you must create a parent customer for every Accounts Receivable type you need.
To create parent customers:
- Go to Customers & leads and select Customers (Take me there).
- Select New customer to open the Customer information dialog.
- Specify a name for the account in the Company field.
You can use the name of an Accounts Receivable account on the Chart of Accounts to identify the parent customer. - Select Save.
Repeat these steps for every Accounts Receivable type you need.
Step 2: Change your existing customers to sub-customers
Next, you need to identify which customers are sub-customers of the parent you created.
- Go to Customers & leads and select Customers (Take me there).
- Locate and select the existing customer to change.
- Select Edit to open the Customer information dialog.
- Select the Is a sub-customer checkbox.
- Select the parent customer you created from the Parent dropdown list.
- Select Save.
You can now group and sub-total your open receivables and filter customer reports by the associated parent accounts.
Use location tracking to group payables or receivables
Locations are automatically reported on the default Customer Balance Detail and Supplier Balance Detail Reports.
To use location tracking to group payables or receivables, you must have turned on location tracking on the Advanced tab of the Account and Settings page. You can then select the Location item on the All Lists screen to set up different locations to use. (For more information about location tracking, see Set up and use location tracking.)
Once you have turned on and set up locations, you can run your report to make sure that all transactions are assigned to a location associated with an Accounts Receivable or Accounts Payable type, and then customise it to report one location at a time.
You must run a separate report for each location, as you cannot run one report and sort it by location.
To run and customise the report:
- Go to Reports (Take me there).
- Search for and open the Customer Balance Detail or Supplier Balance Detail report.
- Make sure that all invoices, bills, or other transactions have locations noted in the Location column. If not, you can select the transaction and add the Location directly from the report.
- Select Customise.
- In the Customise report panel, select the Filter item to open that section.
- Select one of the locations from the Location dropdown list.
- Select Run report.
The total of all of the reports will equal the total Accounts Receivable or Accounts Payable.