 QuickBooks Online 2024, pay bills form, get ready and pack some trail mix because we're hiking on QuickBooks Online, our audit trail to success. Here we are online in our browser searching for QuickBooks Online Test Drive, the primary tool we'll be using for the first part of the course looking for a result that has into it.com, in the URL, into it being the owner of QuickBooks, selecting the United States version of the QuickBooks Online Test Drive and confirming that we're not a robot. We're going to duplicate some tabs to put reports in like we do every time. Right click it on the tab up top so we can duplicate it. As that tab is thinking, I will right click again and duplicate again. As that tab is thinking, I'm going back to the middle tab, down to the reports on the left, open up one of the favorites, the balance sheet, and then we're going to tab to the right, down to the reports on the left again, and this time open up the other favorite report, the income statement or profit and loss report. That's the setup process we do every time. The first tab is where we're going to be doing our data input, and then we'll check the results on the financial statements, which is one of the end goals of our bookkeeping process, the generation, the preparation, the creation of the financial statements and related reports. If I select the dropdown here, you'll recall that we've been focusing in on the vendor cycle. So we have the entire accounting cycle that goes around in a circular type of fashion once everything has been set up, and then we can think of the internal cycles within that accounting cycle, one of those being the vendor cycle. You'll recall that if we have a very easy vendor cycle, and just before I get into that, remember that the vendor represents someone that we are paying. A vendor in general terms could mean anybody that sells stuff, we could be a vendor. But from the accounting term, we have to think about which side of the table these terms are defining. And for QuickBooks, vendor means that the money is ultimately going out from us to other people that are selling stuff to us, and we're going to be using those goods and services to help us generate revenue is the general idea. So when we're paying for things then, the easiest process would be to use an expense form, an electronic payment, mainly because you can connect that to the bank feeds these days, and it would be a very quick transaction, and we could possibly rely on the bank feeds to actually record the transaction, which we'll talk more about in future presentations. A still a cash-based system, but one that's a little bit more complex is one that we actually write the checks when they come due with an actual physical check. The reason that's more complicated, even though it's still a cash-based system, is because it takes more time for the check to clear, so generally we would not want to rely on the bank feeds, but rather we would want to enter the checks as we write them so we can track the outstanding checks. We are now looking at the accrual process first, which means we entered a bill. We focused on the bill last time, recalling that a bill form is different than an expense form in that the bill form will be increasing accounts payable. That's what a bill form means within QuickBooks. In common parlance, in common terminology, you might call a bill anything that you receive from the phone company or any other vendor that gives it to you. But unless you pay it with an actual bill form or unless you enter it into QuickBooks with a bill form, then it's not really a bill form for QuickBooks. You would just pay it with a check or you would pay it with an expense form. Remember that the form that you actually receive might say invoice on it because this is another one of those terms that's interchangeable in normal common language, but with regards to QuickBooks, it's one side of the table. So if the other company, if the utility company was using QuickBooks, they would send us an invoice. The bill that we get would say invoice on it, but to us it would be a bill and more specifically it would not be a bill to us, a bill form if we paid it off with an expense or check form. It would only be a bill form if we entered it in our system as a bill which would increase the accounts payable. Once we increase the accounts payable, we then have to track the bills and then pay off the bills. And that's where we are here with a pay bills form. Now you might be thinking, wait a second, isn't this all the same? It's just money coming out of the checking account. We have three forms now showing basically the same thing. An expense form, a check form, and a pay bills form are all decreases to the checking account. That's what they do. But they have specific things related to them. The expense form means that it's an electronic transfer and it's probably going to the other side is going to go to an expense, most likely a check form. It has a check number field in it. And then the pay bills forms means it's a decrease to the checking account, but it's also telling you just by the form itself that it's going to be decreasing the accounts payable rather than going to some other expense. Like it's not going to be going to the telephone expense because you hit the telephone expense when we entered the bill and now we're going to be paying off the bills, so it's going to be going to accounts payable. So if we go into, let's go to the balance sheet and I'm going to close the hamburger and let's scroll up a little bit. I'm at 150 on the scrolling. If I go down to the accounts payable and click on it, we can see the detail in the accounts payable. And so now we have what's happening here, it goes up when we enter a bill and it goes down with the bill payment, which is a pay bill form in essence, which is still a check, but it's a special check which decreases the debt back down. Notice the accounts payable is a much more easy account to track than cash, for example, when we go into the detail like the general ledger, which this is basically a general ledger, the transaction report, because it only goes up with bills and it goes down with the pay bill. So we should be able to kind of check everything off like this and tie everything out. Let's go back. We also are going to have another report that ties into accounts payable. And let's find that I'm going to go to the tab to the right. I'm going to right click on this tab and duplicate it again. And then we'll go into the reports again on the left hand side and let's close up the hamburger. And then go down, we're looking who owes you, no, we're looking for what you owe. And so I'm going to go to the vendor balance detail over here. And this will give us the information by vendor. So these are basically the open bills. And the point is that the bottom line of that, the 1660267 should tie out to what's on the balance sheet. And we can also see that internally, if I'm checking these outstanding bills, if I'm going to be using, in other words, this pay bill form, normally I probably wouldn't just go directly into the pay bill form here, but I might instead be looking for the bills I need to pay in another way first. Because I might, for example, close this out and go into my expenses. And then I could search for the bills that are open by going to the expenses tab here. I could search here by hitting the drop down and search for my bills. And then I could filter and search for status as open. So the bills that are open, and we're going to say, okay. And so now we just have the open bills. So I probably might go in here and search the open bills first and get an idea of what I want to do, or we might go into the vendors here and we could do a similar process by going into the unpaid items. And then we can kind of search by status and we could search by due date. And then we could also go into the vendors center. And we could see that we have the overpaid items. And then we have all of the open bills. Now when we actually go into the bill, the pay bill form, however, you'll note that we do have, if I hit this plus button and I go to the pay bills, we could select