Group Debtors or Creditors account types

To organise your books, the general recommendation is to maintain one Debtors account and one Creditors account.

Your default and only Debtors and Creditors 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.

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 Debtors type you need.

To create parent customers:

1. Go to All apps , select Customer Hub, then select Customers & leads (Take me there).
2. Select New customer to open the Customer panel.
   Note: If you're creating a customer for the first time, then select Add customers.
3. Enter a name for the account in the Customer display name field.
   You can use the name of a Debtors account on the Chart of Accounts to identify the parent customer.
4. Select Save.

Repeat these steps for every Debtors 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.

1. Go to All apps , select Customer Hub, then select Customers & leads (Take me there).
2. Locate and select the existing customer to change.
3. Select Edit to open the Customer panel.
4. Select the Is a sub-customer checkbox.
5. Select the parent customer you created from the Parent customer ▼ dropdown.
6. 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 Locations item on the All lists page 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 a Debtors or Creditors 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:

1. Go to Reports and select Standard reports (Take me there).
2. From the Type report name here ▼ dropdown, search for Customer Balance Detail or Supplier Balance Detail and select it.
3. 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.
4. Select Customise.
5. In the Customise panel, select the Filters item to open that section.
6. Select one of the locations from the Location ▼ dropdown.

The total of all of the reports will equal the total Debtors or Trade and other receivables.