QuickBooks 2011: The Missing Manual

Running Expense-Related Reports

Vendors & Payables reports (choose Reports→Vendors & Payables) tell you how much you owe each vendor and when the bills are due. The reports in the Purchases category (Reports→Purchases) on the other hand, focus on how much you’ve bought from each vendor you work with. This section tells you how to put the reports in these two categories to work.

A/P Aging and Vendor Balance Reports

If your company is flush with cash and you pay bills as soon as they appear in the Pay Bills window, your A/P Aging reports and Vendor Balance reports will contain mostly zeroes. In fact, because the Pay Bills window lets you sort bills by due date, discount date, vendor, and amount, you might not find any reason to run these reports. For example, if you juggle payments to vendors to conserve cash, you can easily pay the oldest bills first by sorting bills by due date. But if you want an overview of how much you owe each vendor and how much is overdue, use one of the following reports:

• A/P Aging Summary. This report shows all the vendors you owe money to, and how old your balances are for each one. Double-click a value to see a report of the transactions that produced the amount owed, for example, to look at a bill that’s more than 90 days overdue.

• A/P Aging Detail. Run this report to see each unpaid bill sorted by the billing date and grouped by bills that are current, those that are 1 to 30 days overdue, 31 to 60 days overdue, 61 to 90 days overdue, and more than 90 days ...