QuickBooks 2005: The Missing Manual

Paying Your Bills

Entering bills in QuickBooks is not paying bills. The bills you enter are a record of what you owe and when, but they do nothing to send money to your vendors. In QuickBooks, Pay Bills is the command that pushes your money out the door. With this one command you can select the bills you want to pay, how much to pay for each one, your payment method, the payment account, and the date for the payment. If you have credits or early payment discounts, you can include those, too.

Tip

If you want to evaluate all your unpaid bills before you begin paying them, choose Reports→Vendors & Payables→Unpaid Bills Detail. QuickBooks displays the bills due up to the current date, grouped by vendor. To include bills due in the future, in the Dates box, choose All. If you want to inspect a bill more closely, double-click anywhere in the line for that bill.

WORKAROUND WORKSHOP: Accounts for Reimbursable Expenses

QuickBooks won't accept the same income account for multiple reimbursable expense accounts. You have to create a separate income account (see Chapter 2) for each type of reimbursable expense.

To keep your Charts of Accounts neat, create a top-level income account called something like Reimbursed Expenses. Then create an income subaccount for each type of reimbursable expense. When you're done, your income accounts will look like this:

4100 Service Revenue

4200 Product Revenue

4900 Reimbursed Expenses - Income

Subaccounts for account 4900:

Table 10-1. 

4910	Reimbursed Telephone ...