Paying Bills in QuickBooks®

by Kendra
(London ON)

Hey there!

I am using QuickBooks® to do the bookkeeping for a company with many bank accounts.

I understand how to enter in vender bills to the program, but how do I apply partial payments to them? and how do I apply old payments to bills with an outstanding balance without effecting the bank balance?

Please help, any info would be great.

Hey Kendra,


First Question

To apply a partial payment, go to Pay Bills and select the vendor's invoice you want you want to pay.

Tab over to the Amt. Paid column and type in/overwrite the partial payment amount you want to pay on this particular invoice ... then continue on just as you would when the total amount of the invoice is paid.


Second Question

I'm a little unsure what you are asking about regarding the "old" payments".

It sounds like the bank reconciliations have been done and someone probably paid bills using Write Cheques even though the vendor invoice had been entered and was outstanding in Accounts Payable.

If this is the case, the expenses have effectively been entered twice ... once when the invoice was entered into Enter Bills ... and again when the Write Cheques was entered. You can verify this by going to the expense account to see if the amount has been recorded twice.

Often times internet advice recommends that you delete the transaction and re-enter it correctly. Then when you reconcile your bank account in the next period, a change in your opening balance will show. You would then just re-clear the cheque.

However, I am not a fan of deleting transactions that have been issued and/or reconciled transactions.

I explain how I would fix this type of error in Pay Bills vs. Write Cheques in QuickBooks®. It covers open and closed accounting periods.

In open periods, you would do a simple edit. In closed periods, you would do a correcting / reversing journal entry.

If your "old bills" problem is something other than this, could you post back with more details?




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