Quick Books® 2010 All-in-One For Dummies®

Chapter 2. Paying Vendors

In This Chapter

• Working with purchase orders

• Recording the receipt of items

• Entering bills

• Paying bills

• Using the other Vendor menu commands

You can make the process of tracking vendor information as simple or as sophisticated as you like. In this chapter, I assume that you're going for sophisticated. However, you can make vendor management simpler by not using purchase orders or an accounts payable system.

Tip

You decide whether to use purchase orders and whether to track accounts payable (amounts that you owe vendors) as part of setting up QuickBooks. You can also later change your decision about using purchase orders or accounts payables. To do this, you choose the Edit

Creating a Purchase Order

A purchase order serves a simple purpose: It tells some vendor that you want to purchase some item. In fact, a purchase order is a contract to purchase.

Many small businesses don't use purchase orders. But when they grow to a certain size, many businesses decide to use them because purchase orders become permanent records of items that you've ordered. What's more, using purchase orders often formalizes the purchasing process in a company. For example, you may decide that nobody in your firm can purchase anything that costs more than $100 unless he gets a purchase order. If only you can issue purchase orders, you've effectively controlled purchasing activities through this ...