QuickBooks 2011: The Missing Manual

Bills

The Bills category lets you specify how you want to handle the bills that vendors send you. The My Preferences tab is empty, so these settings all appear on the Company Preferences tab:

• Bills are due _ days after receipt. The first time you access Bills preferences, you’ll find that QuickBooks has set this preference so that bills you enter show a due date 10 days after the date of the bill. For instance, if you receive a bill dated June 15, and you enter that date in the Enter Bills window’s Date field, QuickBooks automatically changes the Bill Due field to June 25. This value is fine in most cases. If a bill arrives that’s due in a different number of days, you can change its due date in the Enter Bills window’s Bill Due field.

• Warn about duplicate bill numbers from same vendor. Surely you don’t want to pay the same bill twice, so be sure to turn on this checkbox so that QuickBooks warns you that you’re entering a bill with the same number as one you already entered from the same vendor.

• Paying Bills. If you want QuickBooks to automatically apply to your bills any credits and discounts to which you’re entitled, turn on the “Automatically use credits” and “Automatically use discounts” checkboxes. For example, if you typically receive a 15-percent discount on all purchases and also have a $100 credit, QuickBooks applies these adjustments to your bill before calculating the total. When you turn on the “Automatically use discounts” checkbox, in the Default Discount Account drop-down ...