LoginQuickBooks Mobile Apps – Post 2 of 5 – “Add Bills”
Over the years you’ve asked for all kinds of variations of our tried-and-true receipt reader solution (which is part of ProOnGo Expense). About two years ago, we started to get requests from QuickBooks users who said “you let us scan our receipts to create expenses in QuickBooks, could you please, please help us do the same thing for bills we receive from vendors?” (spoiler alert – the answer is now “yes” – as you’ll see in the video)
To a non-QuickBooks user, the distinction between a bill and receipt might seem trivially small. They are both paper documents that signify a payment of some kind, right? Well, to you QuickBooks folks out there, you know the huge difference. Most receipts that find yourself tracking, are either for a credit card charge (which lives in your register for that precise credit card), or perhaps for a debit card transaction, or once in awhile a receipt for something that you paid for by check.
However, Vendor Bills are a bit different from Receipts
First, unless you are a particularly cash-rich business, there is a good chance that you receive bills from your vendors that you don’t pay right away. Perhaps you pay them on Net 30 or Net 45 terms (if you are lucky, maybe Net 60). That means that you are receiving a bill several weeks before you are actually going to pay it. So, it’s not as instantaneous as, say, a debit card transaction where the moment that you conclude the transaction, the bank is already moving money to the recipient. That means that you need some way to keep track of what bills you’ve received, long before you actually pay them, because you’ll no doubt forget 59 days later that you are 1 day from being overdue on that big Net 60 payable.
Second, if you use Accrual basis accounting, the above-described timespan between when you receive a bill and when you pay it, has a crucial impact on your financial statements. The impact of the bill hits your statement of cash flows on the month that you actually pay the bill, or more accurately, whenever the funds leave your account (perhaps because the paper check you sent has been deposited by the recipient, or better yet, because you’ve done a Intuit PaymentNetwork transaction to pay the bill). However, the impact of the bill hits your Income Statement as soon as the exchange of goods or services causes you to bear a future obligation to pay the bill. So, tracking Vendor Bills in QuickBooks is not just a fancy “reminder system” for what’s due to be paid — rather, it has real impact on your financial statements.
Third, Vendor Bills might be paid through any one of your bank or credit card accounts, and perhaps not from the same account every time. That differs wildly from a receipt, where you tend to have decided the payment method right at the point of purchase.
We could go on, but we bet you get the idea. So, Vendor Bills are their own unique beast, worthy of a separate + specialized mobile app.
We Have Something for You
With our new Add Bills app, you can now take pictures of vendor bills, and have them added to your Vendor BIlls list in QuickBooks Pro, Online, Enterprise, or Premier. It’s easy, quick, and it lets you get back to your “day job” (we’ll bet that you’d rather be out generating sales, rather than thinking about the bills you have to pay). The video shows the end-to-end user experience:
…and, don’t forget, the new Add Bills app is just one of five new QuickBooks-compatible mobile apps that we’re launching over the course of five days. You can learn more by hovering over the calendar days below:
