There’s just one problem.  ProOnGo gives you the option to reimburse your employee via either Write Check or Create Vendor Bill, and you aren’t sure which to pick.  To start deciding which technique is right for your company, a good starting point is to talk about the business exchange that is underway:

1. An Employee Paid for a good or service on behalf of the company
2. The Company Benefited from the good or service
3. The Employee Needs to be Reimbursed, to cover the cost of the good or service,

If you are at step 3, and if you are sitting in front of QuickBooks, you are probably thinking in very practical terms about how you need to get QuickBooks to print out a check that you can hand your employee, with as little hassle as possible.  It’s at that point that most QuickBooks users recall the existence of “Vendor Bills” and “Write Check” as two different ways to get QuickBooks to print out a check.

Both of those methods are valid techniques for reimbursing your employees, so we’ll try to provide a balanced explanation of some of the factors that might cause you to choose one or the other approach.

First, lets talk about the fundamentals of a vendor bill.  Normally, when your business mail arrives every day, you probably have a couple bills to add to the pile.  And if you are super organized, perhaps you enter those as vendor bills in QuickBooks, even if you know you won’t pay them immediately (I know lots of small business owners that pay their Net 30 bills on day 25, and I know far fewer that pay them on day 1).  If that sounds like you, perhaps you like to hold on to your $ until you absolutely have to part with them, but more likely there is some structural reason for your decision — like that your accountant goes through and prints out checks twice a month for all pending bills — or that you reserve every second Friday for your financial cleanup.  Whatever the reason, if you have a normal cycle of receiving vendor bills, entering them into QuickBooks, and then paying them on some pre-defined rhythm, you might be inclined to handle your reimbursements with that same general flow.  And that’s fine (but bear in mind, your employees will want to be paid back relatively quickly, usually within 10 days of expense approval).

Second, lets talk about the fundamentals of a Write Check.  Writing a check is often much more of a spontaneous event than a vendor bill.  In the normal course of business, perhaps you discover a need to make an immediate payment for an unexpected expense, and payment is due immediately (perhaps you are purchasing something from a retailer or a supplier with inflexible payment terms).  So, you crank out a check immediately, print it out, and hand it over or mail it out.  You probably could have done a vendor bill, but in your rush to make payment, you went straight for the fewest number of clicks in QuickBooks, and that was the Write Check technique.  Most business owners have done this from time-to-time (some do it in a rush, but some do it as a general policy).  The general approach of “Write Check” works for expense reimbursement as well, and tends to work especially well in smaller companies that don’t have a need for any kind of sophisticated cash management strategy that dictates a particular cadence for paying bills and reimbursing expenses.

We’ll bet that on average, more QuickBooks users end up running their reimbursements via Write Check as opposed to Vendor Bill.

In ProOnGo, when you run your reimbursements, the choice is up to you: Vendor Bill or Write Check.  We’ll take care of getting all of the information into QuickBooks so that you get to skip straight to doing the reimbursement.

Did you know: You can use ProOnGo to reimburse your employees using Vendor Bills, Checks, or both! Check out how we sync to QuickBooks (not JUST reimbursable expenses!).

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