Question

Using Accrual method - Bills vs. expenses

3 replies
79 views

I created a bill for an invoice I received in one month. Then I paid the bill in the subsequent month. I use Accrual method. When I downloaded my banking information to QB, the "expense" wants to report in both months. In Dec under the bill, and in Jan under the actual expense from my bank statement. What have I done wrong? Thanks in advance.

QuickBooks Online

M

mazar

Level 6

Hello,

If you link the bank download to the actual bill you entered in QBO, it will create a bill payment and close that bill.

When you run your reports, if you run them in accrual mode, it will show you incurred the expense when you entered the bill because that's when your expense account was hit.

If you run a report in cash mode, it will only show the expense when you paid the bill because that is when the money changed hands.

It just depends how you want to run your report.

In the end, 4 accounts where affected by 2 transactions and your expense was only affected once.

Entering Bill:

Expense Account goes up

Accounts Payable goes up

Paying Bill (bank download)

Bank account goes down

Accounts payable goes down

L

LalatadaAuthor

I matched the bank download to the bill. The bill now shows as paid. The amount is listed in my P&L for December (under the bill), and for January, (under the payment which came from my bank download). Both the payment and the bill are under the same Category, so it isn't that. I cannot figure out how to stop this double reporting.

Jen_D

Level 8

Thanks for posting here again, @Lalatada,

Anything you match should not double post in the financial report. In the meantime, if this only happened once, open your account in a different browser. You can also use a private window and run the Profit and Loss report from there.

Unexpected issues in QBO are most of the times affected by the large data in the cache. This is because the regular browser will constantly accumulate data and will not remove its history automatically.

The incognito mode will not save any history, so it's a great place to identify issues in the browser. Use these keyboard shortcuts to launch a new private window:

Google Chrome: press Ctrl + Shift + N
Mozilla Firefox: press Ctrl + Shift + P
Safari: press Command + Shift + N

If the update goes through, clear the cache to resolve the issue in regular browsing.

Let me know how it goes. I'll be right here if you need further assistance. Just mention me in this thread. Have a good day!

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