Bill payment in QuickBooks Online

Managing expenses alongside sales is an important part of managing a small business.

In QuickBooks Online, users can enter bills and apply bill payments towards them. This lets them track their expense transactions alongside their sales.

Learn more about how QuickBooks Online users enter bills.

Learn about the billing cycle

Small businesses often work with multiple to buy the products or services they need to run their business.

This billing process usually starts when a business sends a purchase order to a vendor, telling the vendor they intend to buy products or services.

The vendor delivers the product or service and then sends the business a bill.

The business can enter the bill into QuickBooks so they can track all of and keep their accounts up-to-date.

Learn how billing works in QuickBooks

If users intend to buy products or services from a vendor, they can create and send a purchase order from QuickBooks.

When users get bills from a vendor, there are a few ways they can enter it into QuickBooks.

Once the users enters a bill into QuickBooks, they can create a bill payment and then apply it to the bill. This covers the cost of the bill and balances their accounts.

Since business don’t always pay for bills right away, they need a way to track what they owe. That’s where accounts payable (AP, A/P) comes in. Accounts payable tracks the outstanding balance owed to vendors or suppliers. Basically, it’s an account that tracks all open, unpaid bills the business still needs to pay for. Learn more about accounts payable.

On they other hand, if the user needs to record a refund for items they returned or sent back, or they overpaid the vendor, they can create a vendor credit in QuickBooks. These represent what the vendor owes for overpayments or returns.

Recording the complete billing cycle in QuickBooks has a few advantages:

What’s on a bill

Purchase orders, bills, and expenses all look very similar to invoice forms in QuickBooks.

Bill and expense forms provide details about the vendor and the business buying the items, an itemized list of the products and services sold, the transaction total, and additional details such as the payment due dates and terms.

Bill forms usually include an itemized list. Each line on the list represents a specific item on the bill, such as a product or service. Users can use lines to point an expense account and add a summarized total, rather each specific item.

What’s connected to bills

In QuickBooks Online, bills are associated with vendors and items so users always can track what they owe at any given time:

When a bill is paid, it should be connected to a bill payment which records the payment transaction. Usually, this is handled via credit card or a checking account.

How this relates to app development

Billing is a fundamental workflow in QuickBooks Online.

Creating and paying for bills requires you to reference specific vendor, account, items (products and services), and billPayment objects in QuickBooks. These may or may not already exist for a given user’s QuickBooks Online company.

When you’re developing your app, think about how it will link bills with the correct items, vendors, and accounts.

You can create and query bill data via the bill entity.

Learn more about the purchaseOrder , vendor, and other related entities.

Implement billing features for your app

Before you get too far into development, set up the basic billing implementation so you have pre-created objects to reference and use.