clearing billable expenses

You've come to the right place for assistance, dLearned.

To enable you to remove inactive customers, let's ensure there are no open billable balances for that specific customer. You can go to your customer's created Expense, Check, or Bill transaction and uncheck the Billable column from there. I'll guide you through the steps.

Here's how:

1. In your QuickBooks Online (QBO) account, go to Sales and click the Customers tab.
2. Select the Unbilled Activity tile and click on the specific customer.

       3. In the Transaction List tab, you'll see their open billable expenses. 

       4. Click on that transaction, and select Bill.

       5. Tick the box to uncheck the Billable column.

       6. Once done, select Save and close.

Once these billable expense transactions are marked as regular expenses, these will no longer appear in the unbilled activity section. Thus, you can now make your customers inactive to remove them from your customer list.

Here's how to make them inactive:

1. Go to Sales from the left menu bar, and select the Customers tab.
2. Select the Edit dropdown and click Make inactive.

Moreover, you can check out this article to guide you on what specific reports you'll need to review your sales transactions: Run reports in QuickBooks Online.

You're always welcome to reply in the comments below if you have additional QuickBooks concerns. We'd be delighted to have you back in this forum. Take care!

Thanks for the reply but this doesn't seem to work.  When I go to the customers tab, and click on unbilled, it is only showing unbilled within the last 365 days.  My unbilled expenses are all over 10 years old.

I can see them listed if I select unbilled income in the All Sales tab, but there is nothing to unselect.

Hey there, @dLearned. 

Thanks for reaching back out on this post. Allow me to point you in the right direction to get this handled. 

Since none of the steps have worked, I recommend contacting our Customer Support Team for further assistance. Here's how: 

1. Go to the Help icon in the top right-hand corner. 
2. Tap the Contact Us button/hyperlink. 
3. Enter your question and hit Let's talk. 
4. Scroll down and pick Get a callback.

It's that easy! 

Come back if you have any other questions or concerns. I'm only a post away if you need me. Bye for now! 

The easiest way to clear these is to convert the "unbilled expenses" to invoices, then zero out the quantities invoiced.  It has no impact on either revenue nor inventory levels (nor your balance sheet).  There is also a much faster bonus in that you can add in all pending unbilled expenses for the customer in one transaction.

My business has over 4000 sku's and anything that was listed as an "inactive" item in QB desk top shows as a "deleted" item in QBO.  The designation is essentially the same but confusing when seeing the word "deleted" next to the sku.  All items that were inactive/deleted had to be made active again to clear the charges off.

As far as invoicing a zero amount invoice, the software only sees the unbilled expense as converted to an invoice, thus closing out the open transaction.  the dollar amount has no bearing on the ability to clear them out this way.