How to Automate Bills in QuickBooks Online (Full Transcript)

[00:00:00] Speaker 1: If you pay contractors, rent, or any recurring bills, this video will save you hours every month. I'll show you how to get bills into QuickBooks Online automatically, pay them on a schedule, and never miss a due date again. I'm David, I've partnered with Intuit to bring you this tutorial, so if you don't have QuickBooks yet, head to the link in the description below to set up an account. Let's dive in. So here we are on the QuickBooks homepage. This tutorial works with any QuickBooks accounting plan. So there are three ways you can get bills into QuickBooks. We'll start with the one you'll use most. Head over to the All Apps button and then go to Expenses and Bills, and then Bills. In most cases, you'll get bills and invoices emailed to you, so the best approach is to forward them to the email address you see at the top of this screen. Fortunately, we've got a fresh bill in our inbox, so let's use this Copy button and then head over to Outlook. So Alex here has sent us a tax preparation bill for the year, we can go ahead and forward that to the email address that QuickBooks provided, and when you head back to the bill page, you'll see a Processing in the bottom right. It's going to extract that attachment and then read the invoice for you. It takes about a minute, but once it's done, you'll see it pop up in the For Review tab. Now this table is pretty nice. QuickBooks was able to extract several properties of the bill, and you can see those here. It's easy to miss, though, that you can actually preview the PDF by moving your mouse over this icon. But as with any AI process, you should verify that it got the correct info. So you can do that by clicking Review. The original bill is on the left and the extracted data is here on the right. Of course, you want to get the due date right, the amounts right, and also the vendor right. If it's a new vendor, which this one is, it's easy to click add them by clicking Add New. Since we're working on bills right now, I'll just fill in the name quickly and move on. We'll set up vendors properly in the next section. Everything looks okay so far, but if we scroll down, we'll see a spurious expense was picked up. You can just click the trash can icon to delete it. Once you're satisfied with this data, you can click Save and Close to move it to the unpaid state. That means it's no longer accessible on this For Review tab. You'd need to go to Unpaid. This leads us to method two for creating a bill, and that's uploading it directly. That starts from the Add Bill button in the top right. Click it and then click Create Bill. Grab the invoice file from your desktop. It can be a PDF or an image file, and then drag it into this left section. After about 30 seconds to a minute, QuickBooks' AI will break down your invoice into line items, including the amounts, descriptions, and inferred categories. Definitely check on those categories, especially for first-time vendors. It might not get it quite correct. Now, just like last time, we still have to add a vendor. But this time, let's add more information so we can actually pay them. That definitely includes the email address, so make sure you add that first. If you intend to pay them with a check, fill in their address down below. If you're using good old-fashioned ACH, though, you can fill in that account info down here. And this time, when we save the vendor, we can actually schedule the payment. This pop-up is fine. We do wanna keep our attachment here. Now we've got this bill squared away. Let's schedule the payment. This is where bill pay kicks in. The first time you try to pay a vendor, you gotta choose a bill pay plan. The main difference between basic and premium is how many free ACH transfers you get a month. Basic gives you five, and premium gives you 40. If you go over those limits, you pay a per-transaction cost, which you can see here. The value of the elite plan is if you're with a larger company and you need bill approvers or payment release approver workflows. I'm gonna choose basic for this video because it's free, and I know you guys like free stuff too. To complete your enrollment, you will need to verify your business information and provide a bank account. This is pretty straightforward, so come join me when you're done. Once you're subscribed, you'll come to the Schedule Bill Payments screen. First, make sure your bank account is set up properly. We see this warning up in the top left, so let's click on it and then click Manage. It wants us to map our actual checking account to an account inside of QuickBooks. In case you don't have this set up, click Add New, name your account something like Checking Account, select Bank from the account type, and then choose the detail type which makes most sense. Make sure the opening balance is set up correctly, otherwise you'll run into reconciliation problems later. When you're done, click Save, but I'm gonna click Cancel since I already have this set up, and then click Save again. We'll go through the rest of this line pretty quickly. First up is Payment Method. If you click Edit here, you see there are two options, Paper Check and Bank Payment. When you pre-fill the vendor information, it gets filled in here automatically. And in case you missed it earlier, paper checks cost $1.50 per bill. So while it's convenient if that's all the vendor accepts, just make sure you're aware of it. You can also configure when the funds will be withdrawn from your account by selecting the withdrawal date. Two other quick things to know, you can change the amount that you pay. So if you wanna do a partial payment, that's possible here. And you can also include what's called a remittance with your payment. So vendors will already get a notice of the bill that you're paying. Just use this if you need to send more information. When you're done, click on Continue to view the payment. When you're ready, click Schedule Payment. So one quick tip is to give yourself a buffer the first time you pay a vendor. Processing for those can sometimes take longer than expected. We'll save and close this. You can find that under the arrow in the bottom right. And here we are back on our Bills page. But I haven't showed you method number three to enter a bill, and that's to create it manually. To do that, head back to Add Bill and then Create Bill. The only difference here is that you don't upload anything. You just fill in all of this by hand. Because it's basically the same process after that, we won't walk through it again. That's a bill entered and paid. But if any of your vendors or contractors, there's one checkbox you need to flip now or you'll be scrambling in January. Let's go to the Vendors page and set them up properly. That Vendors page is under Expenses and Bills. So let's click it and see who we've got there. You can create a new vendor using this button in the top right. But let's take a look at an existing vendor. Grady here is a great example because he's a contractor. Here you'll see all of your vendor's details and how much money you still owe them. Grady's probably not happy with us right now. You can also edit their info using the dialog we saw earlier. Let's walk through a couple more details you may wanna set. First up is tracking payments for 1099s. You'll find this under the ACH info card. This checkbox is a huge bonus. Not only does it track how much you've paid this contractor, but in January next year, it'll file the 1099 with the IRS, as well as email a copy to the contractor. This additional info card can also save you time later by choosing default payment terms and the default expense category for this contractor. A rare but useful setting is the opening balance. Basically, this is an amount you already owe a vendor before you set them up, so you can pay a bill against it if you need to. If you fill this in when you create a new vendor, it would create a bill which you can pay immediately. Once you set up your vendors, you can pay a whole batch of bills in one go. That's where accounts payable becomes a real process. So to do that, let's head back to the bills area by going to expenses and bills and then bills. QuickBooks makes this really easy to run an accounts payable process every week. You'll first come to this page and see all of your open bills at once. Then you'll click pay bills in the top right to start a pay run. You'll select the bills that you wanna pay here and then click schedule payment. As of filming, you set up partial payments on the next screen, not on this screen. You'll get to the same bill screen we saw before. This time, you just have multiple bills you can pay. That covers paying the bills that you have now, but rent, subscription, utilities, those come back every month. QuickBooks can create those bills for you automatically. These are called recurring bills and you can access them by going back to the bills page and then clicking on the recurring tab. We don't have any yet, but we can create one by clicking add bill and then create recurring bill. There are three modes for a recurring bill and here's a simple table to run through them. Scheduled bills have a predictable date and a predictable amount. Think of things like rent or fixed price subscriptions. Reminders can be good when you have a predictable date, but an unpredictable amount like utilities. An unscheduled means an unpredictable date and an unpredictable amount. These are just templates that you can reuse. Let's build examples of each of these so you can see how they work. First up is scheduled. This is going to be for our monthly rent. This is just like creating a bill, so I filled in the information we've already looked at. Now down in this section, we set the bill issue date. You have quite some flexibility in the intervals. You can go from daily all the way to yearly. You can make this bimonthly and you can change the exact day of the month it hits on. You can also choose the start and end dates for this bill. If you leave them blank, it assumes it starts automatically. You can also create this bill before the bill date by filling in the create blank days in advance field. Now I'll make this show up as early as possible by setting it to tomorrow's date. That completes a scheduled bill, so let's save the template and move on to reminders. You'll see the bill show up in the recurring list, so let's add our next bill. This one is the reminder. The setup is very similar to the scheduled recurring bills. Note that because the amount is unpredictable, I've left it blank, but I've still included the line item. Let's save this template and then finish up with the unscheduled bill. Unscheduled bills are literally just templates, so we don't have any timetables to worry about. Now we've created each of these three types, let's see how you actually use them. Now scheduled bills are created as unpaid bills, but the catch is they won't be created for at least 24 hours after you set them up. So I've just come back a day later to show you how each of these bills appear. We'll start with the scheduled bill. Remember, that's for our shop's rent. You'll see it's automatically created under the unpaid tab. Here it is at the bottom of the list. You see the bill amount and the due date have been automatically set. Next up, I'll show you the unscheduled bill that is for David's Donut Den. Remember, this is just a template for a bill that you can use anytime. So to do that, go over to pay bills and then click on manage recurring bills. The unscheduled bill here in the first row has an action called use. When you click it, it fills in all the fields from the template and then you can fill in the rest. Bills that are reminders are a different story. Unfortunately, you won't get an email notification about them. To find them, you'll need to go to your reminder list. Personally, I prefer the scheduled option to the reminders because I can always modify it if the amount changes. That way the bill is always in the unpaid section waiting for me. Here's the thing about the accounts payable process. The setup takes 20 minutes but it pays you back every single month. Forward your next bill to your QuickBooks email and see how fast it gets picked up for you. And if you haven't started with QuickBooks yet, check out the link in the description below to get going. I'm David and I'll see you in the next video.