Receiving vendor invoice for partial payment

This doesn't seem to answer the question.  I issued a PO for a 6 month work period for 75K.  Each month I receive a progress billing for work done to date.  At the end of month one, I owe 12K of the 75K.  How do I recognize that amount and not add up the 75K plus 12K?

Let me share with you the process, Jbell.

When you create the purchase order, you'll have to enter a quantity and amount. This way, you can create a partial bill. In your case, you'll have to add 6 as the quantity and 12,500 as the rate. It will total to an amount of $75,000. 

Then, create a bill from the purchase order. We'll have to change the quantity manually to 1. This way, it will only convert $12,500. I know you want it to show $12,000. However, if we enter the amount $75,000 without adding any quantity and rate, you're unable to convert the purchase order partially. 

Once done, you can check the purchase order. It should show 1 in the RCV'D column. It means you've created or converted 1 bill from it.

I'll add this reference to help you manage your purchase orders: Create purchase orders in QuickBooks Desktop.

Feel free to click the Reply button below if you need more of our help. We'll get back to this thread as soon as we can. 

Has anyone come up with a solution to this yet? I use quick books to make a PO but how do you enter a progress draw against the PO without having to re-do the purchase order?

Is there not a better way? What if I don't know the value of the progress draw from month to month? We need to be able to entre random progress draw amounts against the purchase order value. I am hoping quick books can track the outstanding amount so the Vendor does not get overpaid if they over invoice.

This is what I'm looking for as well.  Is there no better way to do this?  It looks like to receive a bill I need to first adjust the PO to accommodate the monthly billing value, then receive the bill against the PO.  Is this truly the only option?

I'm looking for the same solution @Sean841   It seems as though, in the Professional Services version, there should be allowance for this.  I can't find it.  Have you?

Hi Bhess, No unfortunately not. I spent a couple hours on the phone with QB and did lots of searching around. It seems like such a SIMPLE task for software like this to handle... Unfortunately quickbooks has completely dropped the ball on this task. When I called for support they really were not to invested in helping me to find a solution either, which was disappointing. 

Thanks for taking the time to respond.  You saved me hours of research to find the same conclusion.  I hope QB builds this into an upgrade.  I need it.

@Sean841  A little late, but I had this come up with a client this morning.  We followed the previous instructions then we did the percentage of the down payment as the quantity and it worked perfectly.  (i.e. $10,000 down payment on a $100,000 purchase order = .10 as the quantity I hope this helps.  :)

It took me two hours with QB Desktop support to find the answer to "How do I convert a PO to a Bill?"

A client had paid a deposit on an order and for this to reconcile I needed to show the payment in QB.  After being told it can't be done, I kept rewording the issue and after two hours of non sense about what's my client's account number, email, and how many companies do they have and was the software installed on Desktop or a laptop [none of which affects the question or the answer!!!], the rep asked me "Why don't we just convert the PO to a Bill?"  (lots of grumblings)

So this is how you do it...

Go to the VENDORS tab, and select 'Enter Bills'

Enter the vendor of the PO, and a pop-up window comes up asking if you want to bring the information over to the bill from an open PO....Yes.  Another pop-up window comes up with a list of Open POs.  When you select the Open PO, it fills in the Bill.

To make your payment, select the Pay Bills icon towards the top.  The 'Amount Due' will show the entire amount of the Bill, 'Amount To Pay' will also show this amount.  To make a partial payment on this bill, change the 'Amount to Pay' to the current payment.  Check the date and bank account to avoid reconciliation issues.

I hope this saves you two hours and hopefully, blood pressure pills.

The way we found around this problem, that QB's has known about for years, is to customize your PO settings. By changing your PO settings so that the Quantity box now is called Enter the Final Total. Go into your PO, select formatting at the top instead of main. Then select Customize Data Layout then columns. Where the Quantity box is on the left, call it Enter the Final Total in the customize section on the right. We use the Other 1 column, call it Quantity, and Other 2 columns, call it Price Per. These two columns are dummy columns that look good on the PO but do not serve any purpose for partial bill payments. For the Rate column we just enter the name, Enter 1. So you always enter a 1 on this column. If you do not enter a 1 in the rate column the amount column will be zero. You can play with the print order and screen viewing options with the checkmarks. You can also select the order of the columns so it looks good on your PO. We use Quantity (Other 1 old column), Description, Price Per (Other 2 old column), and Amount on our printable PO.  Create a PO using this method. When you are entering the value in Enter the Final Total column you created, you are essentially entering it into the Quantity field in QB's. You can enter multiple lines if you have a multiple items to enter with different values. 

Now go to enter a bill against that PO. Once you select the PO, the information will pop up. The quantity field will now pop up with the full value of your PO that you entered in your created 'Enter the Final Total' value from your PO. So, if your PO is $10,000, enter the value of the bill in quantity area now by erasing the full PO value and entering say $1000. Post the bill and your PO will be reduced by the amount of your bill. It will still show the value outstanding as $9000 now with $1000 being paid out. When you enter another bill against the PO, the $9000 amount will appear in the Quantity field in billing meaning that there is $9,000 left on the PO. If you have entered multiple lines and have multiple figures on your PO, delete the other lines and just enter the value on the one line or multiple lines you are paying.

Try this out on a test PO and bills so you can get the hang of it. 

Hope that helps.

PS: Be careful as QB's does not have any rails on the values. If your PO is $1000 and you enter the bill amount as $10000, it will allow you to complete this and then show you that the PO is closed. You may have overpaid your vendor and unless you did a reconcile you would not know.