Bills from vendors on auto-pay

I'll share information that could help you.

If every information in the bill is the same, you may consider setting up recurring bills. Here is how:

1. Enter the transaction the way you want it to show up each month. Do not select Save. If a field contains info that may change, leave the field blank. For example, leave the Memo field blank on a recurring check so you can enter a different memo.
2. From the Edit menu, select Memorize [Transaction Name]. For example, Memorize Check.
3. Enter a Name. Then, decide how you want QuickBooks to handle it.

For detailed information, refer to this article: Create, edit, or delete memorized transactions.

Otherwise, you will have the happy path of entering bill and bill payments as you normally would. You can visit these articles for the detailed process: 

• Enter bills in QuickBooks Desktop.
• Pay bills in QuickBooks Desktop.

As for your tracking of due dates, you can use the AP Aging Detail/Summary and Unpaid Bills Detail Report. 

I will leave this article you can use in the future: Export reports as Excel workbooks in QuickBooks Desktop.

Feel free to post here again if you have further QuickBooks-related concerns. We are available 24/7 to lend a hand with each of your queries. Stay safe!

Thanks for the info ... The suggestion on using Memorized Transactions is a very good one, and I'll work into that.

I still would like more info / documentation, however, on the process of "schedule online payments", especially in then marking the invoice(s) as paid. I'm going to try one to walk through the process, but I'd like to read up on how QB planned the process to work. I've searched for "schedule" and "online" but nothing seems to come up for "schedule online payments". If you know of specific documentation for that, I'd appreciate it.  

Thanks again.

Hello there, @Deadwood Al. I'll help you get a documented guide about processing scheduled online payments in QuickBooks Desktop (QBDT).

I appreciate you getting back here and considering the recommendation of my colleague. To know how you can set up a scheduled online payments in QBDT, you can go to the For future bill payments section of this article: Pay bills online from QuickBooks Desktop. 

Additionally, to further know information about this process, just scroll down to the Frequently asked questions (FAQs) part of the same article.

If there's any other thing you want to ask or know about managing vendor transactions, please drop a reply below. I'd be glad to provide additional assistance. 

Thank you ... While I haven't read this article in detail, it appears that it is something different than I was thinking of.  Here's more detail on my question:

We have a number of vendors where they automatically draft our bank account on a specific date each month. What I was initially looking for in Online Payments was a way to record the fact that the bill was paid via EFT draft so that an entry would credit checking and debit AP without the need to actually "write a check": At some point, we will use schedule online payment to process ACH payments, so the information you sent will be of help at that point, but right now my search is for something simpler (I think).

Without the need to actually cut a check, how do I move the dollars on the vendor invoice to credit checking and debit AP? I know we could bypass the entry of the bill and simply write a check, but that would then require re-entering a valid check number the next time we actually wrote on check stock, and it would require manually tracking the invoice for the date it should be paid. Seems like a lot of work for a simple problem. So I'm assuming there is a simple solution, I just don't know what it is yet. I was hoping that "Online Payments" was the solution, but it sounds like it is the solution for what we are going to do sometime in the future, but we will still have vendors who are drafting our checking account regularly (i.e. utilities, internet service, rent, etc.) and we need to record those payments and reduce AP liability.  ????  

I hope that better explains what I'm looking for.

Hello Deadwood Al

Thank you for providing those details. It seems as if creating a journal entry may be the best bet for a situation like this. However, I strongly recommend connecting with an accountant to see if this would be the better solution for your firm. If you don't have an accountant, no worries. We offer a ProAdvisor service where you can connect with experts within your area. Here's how:

1. Go to this Find my Accountant link.
2. In the Find an expert in section, choose what you're looking for, then use your search field to enter a City or ZIP code.
3. Select Search.
4. Browse through the results and find one that works best for your business. You can click on each ProAdvisor's profile to learn more information about them.
   

If you have any other questions, I'm just a post away. See you soon!

Hi @Deadwood Al 

You can use memorized transactions for bills and also to enter debit memos for ACH payments out of your checking accounts. Relating the two might be a manual task but someone can do that at their leisure or when they are reconciling the bank account, say. 

I don't know that there is a way to fully automate the task of recording a bill and and then recording an automatic ACH payment on a particular day for that bill. But you can certainly record a payment automatically to keep the cash balance accurate, and apply it to the bill later. (I am not sure how QBO handles the "numbering" of these recurring payments--I do this in desktop where it allows the transaction number to be blank. Hopefully the same is true of QBO.)

Alex_nj:   I'll read through your reply a few times, thanks for sending it. And, BTW, I don't have QBO so all is good there. I'm using QBDT Pro. Thanks again.

We have vendors that auto draft. All the utilities and insurance bills we set up this way. So for those AP transactions we enter the Bill to AP and then when the auto draft hits the bank we mark it as paid but when we "cut" the check we use the date as the check number and print to blank paper. This way you are not using up your preprinted check stock.

If you have more than one that hits on a day - then just use a variation - 07172024 or 71724 or 07224 etc.

This will reduce your AP liability and Cash Balance. Also gives you a visual when doing the bank reconcilement you can sort by check number and all of the auto drafts sort of then land in a group to tie back to your electronic transactions vs. physical checks on your bank statement.

Thanks for the comments: I did use another system that didn't allow EFT or ONLINE as inputs, so I came up with a numbering system to isolate those transactions, something like 8xxxx to identify draft transactions, 7xxxx to identify EFT initiated transactions, etc.   But those were workarounds, and I guess I just have a disappointed view of software systems that make you "work around" a problem rather than providing the solution within the software, especially when it is such a simple thing, like allowing something like EFT or ACH to be allowed and not assuming the next number when we try to print EFT/ACH transactions. And I certainly would not use normal check stock to print these type payment transactions: checks are for check payment, nothing else.