- Customizing Your Home Page for Vendor Activities
- Preferences That Affect Accounts Payable
- Working with the Vendor Center
- The Accounts Payable Process
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
Working with the Vendor Center
QuickBooks makes adding, modifying, and researching vendor activity easy using the Vendor Center. Vendors are individuals or companies that you purchase services or products from, and they are managed in the Vendor Center (see Figure 7.5).
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Figure 7.5 Complete common vendor tasks from the Vendor Center.
From the Vendor Center, you view contact details for your vendors and can access many tasks, including the following:
- Create a new vendor or edit an existing one.
- Add multiple vendors (using the Add/Edit Multiple List Entries feature discussed in Chapter 4, “Understanding QuickBooks Lists,” p. 108).
- Record commonly used vendor transactions.
- Print the vendor list, information, or transactions.
- Export the vendor list or transactions; import or paste vendors from Excel.
- Prepare vendor letters and customize the vendor letter templates.
- Filter your list of vendors to include All Vendors, Active Vendors, Vendors with Open Balances, or a custom filter of your choice.
- Attach documents to vendor records, such as attaching a copy of the signed subcontractor agreement.
- Access a map and driving directions to a vendor’s location.
- Order checks from Intuit.
- Add and edit vendor contact names, to-do reminders, and notes, and track sent emails.
- View and filter a list of transactions by vendor or by transaction type.
- Prepare a QuickReport or Open Balance Report for a given vendor.
Use the Vendor Center to access many of the common vendor transactions and reports you learn about in this chapter and in Chapter 8, “Managing Vendors,” p. 265.
The following sections provide more detail about creating a vendor and using the Vendor Center for researching transactions.
Adding or Modifying Vendors
When you are ready to purchase materials or services for your business, you need to create a vendor. You might already have a head start on adding vendors to your file if you used the Adding Contacts feature available with the Express Start QuickBooks setup discussed in Chapter 1, “Getting Started with QuickBooks,” p. 36.
However, another less frequently used list in QuickBooks is worth mentioning here: the Other Names list. One occasion when you might choose to add a payee to the Other Names list is when you are recording a one-time purchase. Later, if you begin using the vendor regularly, you have a one-time option to remove the payee from the Other Names list and add it to your Vendor list.
This section offers instructions specific to setting up vendors. If your company will be using the Enter Bills process, you have to use a payee from the vendor list; the vendor bill transaction does not allow you to use an Other Names list item in the payee field.
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Would you like to efficiently create new vendor records? Start by entering data in the Company Name field. When you move your cursor out of the Company Name field, QuickBooks also automatically populates the Vendor Name, Billed From, and Print on Check As fields (found on the Payment Settings tab).
The Vendor Name field in QuickBooks is a “look-up” name; this field also controls how your vendors are automatically sorted in the Vendor Center.
If you prefer to use a different vendor look-up name, be sure to enter the proper vendor name in the Print On Check As field on the Payment Settings tab.
Adding a New Vendor
To practice adding a new vendor record, open the sample data file as instructed in Chapter 1. If you are working in your own file, use these instructions to begin entering the vendors you purchase goods and services from:
- On the Home page, click the Vendors button. Alternatively, from the menu bar, select Vendors, Vendor Center.
- If the New Feature highlights display, read the information provided. To dismiss these messages in the future, click the X in the What’s New dialog box. You can enable help from the menu bar by selecting Help, What’s New.
- In the New Vendor drop-down list, in the upper-left corner of the Vendor Center, select New Vendor.
The New Vendor dialog box displays (see Figure 7.6). In the Vendor Name field, type ABC Subcontractor. Note that no two names from any of the lists in QuickBooks can be the same.
Figure 7.6 Completing the contact information for your vendor is good practice for your record keeping.
Leave the Opening Balance field blank. Chapter 3 discusses entering beginning balances in a new QuickBooks file (when previous accounting transactions already were recorded in some other accounting software or by another method). If you are a new business, you will later enter a vendor bill to increase the balance owed to the vendor instead of entering an Opening Balance amount in the New Vendor record.
The As Of (date) field does not have any effect in your QuickBooks file if a dollar value was not entered in the Opening Balance field.
- On the Address Info tab, consider completing the Salutation, First Name, and Last Name fields so you have the option to send letters to your vendors in the future.
- Complete any remaining fields you deem applicable, such as contact information and address.
Click the Payment Settings tab in Figure 7.7. In the Account No. field, enter the account number your vendor has assigned to you, if applicable. This account number can optionally be printed on the memo line of a vendor bill payment check.
Figure 7.7 QuickBooks can add the Account No. field to the memo line of voucher-style checks.
- Select the appropriate payment terms, such as net 30 days, your vendor has assigned to your account. If you don’t see the specific term you need, select Add New to add more payment terms to the list.
- (Optional) Complete the Print Name on Check As field. This field is necessary only if the printed name on the check differs from the Vendor Name field.
- If you are using certain versions of QuickBooks Premier, Accountant, or any version of Enterprise, you have the option to select a Billing Rate Level for your vendor. Billing rates enable you to assign an hourly rate to billable time you will later add to a customer invoice.
- Click the Tax Settings tab to enter the vendor’s tax ID and assign the vendor as eligible for 1099 reporting. Note that if you do not have this information handy when you first create the vendor, you can add this information later and still track all the details. Click No to Entering The Tax ID Now message.
- Click the Account Settings. Select the Repairs:Building Repairs expense account. You can begin typing the account name, or if you know the account number, you can type the account number. QuickBooks vendors can have up to three different accounts assigned that display automatically when you create a new transaction. If you also download transactions from your bank or credit card, click the link to review the information provided about how Account Prefill works with Online Banking now titled Bank Feeds.
- Click the Additional Info tab. From the drop-down Vendor Type menu, select from the provided types or select Add New to create a new vendor type. Use the Vendor Type field to categorize your vendors, which you can then use to filter your vendor and transaction reports.
- If you have created a Custom Field, complete the value for that field. Custom Fields enable you to track supplemental information about your vendors. Click the Define Fields button to add or remove custom fields.
- At any time, you can select or deselect the Vendor Is Inactive checkbox. In such cases, the vendor still appears on reports but does not appear in most drop-down lists you use for creating new transactions. Do not make a vendor inactive if there is a balance in Accounts Payable.
- Click OK to save your changes and close the New Vendor dialog box, or click Cancel to discard your work.
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Are you using QuickBooks Enterprise? With this edition, you can choose from more robust settings when you use Custom Fields. Custom fields are assigned to customers, vendors, employees, or items. For example, you might use custom fields when your inventory items have multiple sizes or colors. With Enterprise, you can have up to 15 custom fields for items. These custom fields are then assigned to items; they can be selected on transactions and can be reported on.
QuickBooks Enterprise adds more robust custom field functionality by permitting you to assign the custom field to use for specific transaction types. With each custom field, you can specify the characteristics of the data, such as a text, date, or number field with or without decimals, or offer a multichoice list for the user to select when entering an item. These are just a few of the available data field types that you can assign. For more information on working with custom fields, see Appendix C, “QuickBooks Enterprise Solutions Features,” p. 783.
Now that you have created a new vendor in the sample file, you are prepared to create a list of your own vendors. Return to the Vendor Center anytime you need to update a vendor’s information.
CAUTION
QuickBooks does not keep a time stamp on revisions made to your vendors’ contact information. After you make a change, all previous records reflect the change to the address or contact information.
However, changes to the Account Prefill selection affect only the newly created transactions.
Finding Vendor Transactions
The Vendor Center not only provides access for adding to or modifying your vendor records in QuickBooks, but also includes convenient access to finding vendor transactions.
With the Vendor Center open, select a vendor to display a list of that vendor’s transactions on the right. Earlier in Figure 7.5, you can see that vendor A Cheung Limited is selected, and to the right are the individual transactions.
You can filter the resulting transactions by selecting options in the Show, Filter By, and Date drop-down lists. The options in the Filter By list change as you make a selection from the Show list.
Figure 7.8 shows representative vendor transaction types. Your transaction types might differ from the displayed types if you do not have the related feature enabled in Preferences. The only transaction type that can have a vendor record assigned that is not included in these options is Make Journal Entry.
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Figure 7.8 Filter the displayed vendor transactions based on multiple criteria.
The Transactions tab in the Vendor Center enables you to review transactions by type rather than by vendor.
Researching Vendor Transactions
To practice finding vendor transactions by type, open the sample data file as instructed in Chapter 1, p. 37. If you are working in your own file, use these instructions to easily locate vendor transactions:
- On the Home page, click the Vendors button to open the Vendor Center. On the left, click the Transactions tab.
Select the Purchase Orders transaction type (see Figure 7.9).
Figure 7.9 Use the Transactions tab of the Vendor Center to find like transaction types.
- (Optional) From the Filter By drop-down list, select Open Purchase Orders.
- (Optional) Filter for a specific date range. This is useful if you are looking specifically for older-dated open purchase orders.
- (Optional) Click any column header to sort that column.
- To view a transaction, double-click or right-click and select Edit Transaction.
- Click the Print icon to print the listed transactions.
- (Optional) Click the View Vendor Info button and click OK if the New Feature message displays. QuickBooks opens the Edit Vendor dialog box for the currently selected vendor. Click OK to close and return to the Vendor Center:Purchase Orders listing.
- Click the Export icon to export the list of transactions to an Excel worksheet or to a comma-separated value file.
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The Vendor Center provides one location to create or modify your vendor records and even research vendor transactions.
Next, you learn about the proper accounts payable process so you can successfully track your vendor business expenses.