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Some payments from a previous accounting period were applied erroneously. I need to unapply the payments from the wrong bills and apply them to the correct bills. Can I do that without causing issues with the prior months' reconciliations?
Thank you.
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There is a trick to do this:
To break the link between the bill and the bill payment without editing the bill payment (and so not impacting reconciliations), edit the bill and change the name on the bill to another name, but don't change anything else. Then save and reopen the bill and change the name back to the original.
Once you've done this for all the bills that have payments misapplied to them, then use the pay bills feature to apply the open bill payments, which will appear as available credits, to the correct bills.
When you apply credits to bills and the new "amount to pay" is 0.00, then no new bill payments are created when you click Pay Selected Bills.
@DA2018 Reconciliations, and closed periods in general, are dependent on the final results being unchanged. Same amount of income, same amount of deposits into bank accounts, same amounts in each expense or COGS account, et cetera.
Whether you can make these kind of changes without causing problems for the closed periods or reconciliations depends on the details of the wrong bills initially marked paid, the correct bills not marked paid, and whether you are cash or accrual. Since you're using bills, I'd assume you're accrual.
In short, to answer your question, you'll need to provide more specific details about the mistakes.
I doubt it'll affect the reconciliations since those depend only on money flowing in and out, but you don't want to make a mess of information used to, say, file past income tax returns.
Nothing would change with the switch except for what payment was applied to which bill. The GL accounts would remain the same, as well as the amounts. The bills are on the same vendor account, but they all got reconciled prior to the current accounting period.
Unapplying a bill payment requires deleting it or voiding it and applying it to the correct bill requires re-creating a new bill payment for the same date and correct vendor and paying the now unpaid bill. That process will cause issues with the reconciliations. After re-creating the bill payments and applying them to the correct bills, you can clear the bill payments in your chart of accounts in the checkmark column. Find the bill payments, then click the box in the checkmark column until the checkmark appears. That should correct the reconciliations.
There is a trick to do this:
To break the link between the bill and the bill payment without editing the bill payment (and so not impacting reconciliations), edit the bill and change the name on the bill to another name, but don't change anything else. Then save and reopen the bill and change the name back to the original.
Once you've done this for all the bills that have payments misapplied to them, then use the pay bills feature to apply the open bill payments, which will appear as available credits, to the correct bills.
When you apply credits to bills and the new "amount to pay" is 0.00, then no new bill payments are created when you click Pay Selected Bills.
Great tip! I mistakenly assumed the vendor needed to be changed (even though the OP stated it was the same vendor - oops).
I'll add that it shouldn't be necessary to go back and unapply/reapply the payments. If the payments were reconciled on the bank statement and the bills were entered for the correct amount, then there should be offsetting A/P debits and credits that can be applied to offset in the current period (this is double-entry accounting after all).
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