Paying bills in QuickBooks Online and Desktop: enter the bill, pay bills, QBO Bill Pay tiers, vendor credits, partial payments and why a bill shows unpaid.
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Paying bills in QuickBooks Online is a two step workflow. You enter the bill when it arrives, which posts the amount to Accounts Payable so the balance sheet shows what you owe, and then you pay it from + Create > Pay bills, which clears that liability and moves cash out of the account you select. QuickBooks Bill Pay, the built in ACH and paper check service, runs on top of that same workflow and its Basic level comes with a QuickBooks Online subscription at no extra charge. QuickBooks Desktop uses the same two steps under Vendors > Enter Bills and Vendors > Pay Bills.
Last updated August 2026. QuickBooks Online is mid rollout of a redesigned interface, so the create button reads + Create in newer accounts and + New in older ones. Both labels are given below.
The part most guides skip is what goes wrong. If a vendor already has an open bill and someone pays them by writing a check or coding a bank feed transaction to an expense account, the bill stays open forever and the cost lands in the profit and loss twice. That single mistake is behind most of the "why does my Accounts Payable keep growing" questions in bookkeeping forums. Every payment against a bill has to run through Pay Bills so QuickBooks can link the payment to the bill it settles.
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Select + Create (labeled + New in older accounts), choose Pay bills, pick the bank or credit card account the money leaves from, set the payment date, tick the bills you want to settle, adjust the amount in the Payment column if you are paying part of one, then select Save and close or Schedule payments online if you use QuickBooks Bill Pay. The bills move to paid and Accounts Payable drops by the same amount.
The bill payment QuickBooks creates is its own transaction, separate from the bill. That matters later: when the withdrawal appears in your bank feed, you match it to the bill payment, never to the bill.
Select + Create, choose Bill, pick the vendor, enter the bill number and the terms, set the bill date and due date, then code the amount on the Category details lines (for services and overhead) or the Item details lines (for products you buy and resell). Save it. The amount now sits in Accounts Payable until you pay it.
Two fields decide whether your payables reporting is any use. The Due date drives the Accounts Payable Aging report, so if you leave it on the default your aging buckets are fiction. The Bill no. field is what stops the same vendor invoice being entered twice, and QuickBooks Online will warn you when a bill number repeats for the same vendor. Filling both takes about four seconds per bill and saves an afternoon at month end.
In QuickBooks Desktop the equivalent is Vendors > Enter Bills. The first bill you enter is what creates the Accounts Payable account in your chart of accounts, which is why a file that has never used bills has no A/P account at all. If you are still setting the file up, our guide to the chart of accounts in QuickBooks Online covers where Accounts Payable sits and why you cannot delete it once it exists.
Timing. A bill is something you owe and will pay later, so it increases Accounts Payable and needs a separate payment transaction to close it. An expense or a check is something already paid, so it reduces the bank balance straight away and never touches Accounts Payable. Use a bill when a vendor invoice arrives with terms. Use an expense when the card was swiped or the transfer already went out.
| Transaction | Use it when | Effect on Accounts Payable | Effect on the bank |
|---|---|---|---|
| Bill | A vendor invoice arrives that you will pay on terms | Increases A/P. Stays open until paid through Pay Bills | None until the bill payment is recorded |
| Bill payment | You settle an open bill | Decreases A/P by the amount paid | Money leaves the payment account you chose |
| Expense | You already paid by card, ACH or transfer | None. A/P is bypassed entirely | Reduces the account immediately |
| Check | You are paying now and want a printed or numbered check | None, unless you use it inside Pay Bills | Reduces the account immediately |
| QuickBooks Bill Pay | You want QuickBooks to send the ACH or paper check for an open bill | Decreases A/P when the payment is scheduled | Debits the funding account when the payment is processed |
Getting this backwards is the most common bookkeeping error in QuickBooks, and it does not announce itself. Coding a payment as an expense when the bill already exists leaves the bill open and records the cost twice, which overstates expenses and inflates payables at the same time. Our guide to bill vs expense in QuickBooks Online walks through what each one does to your reports and how to clean up the ones already recorded wrong.
QuickBooks Bill Pay is Intuit's built in accounts payable service that sends ACH payments and mails paper checks to your vendors from inside QuickBooks Online. It comes in three tiers. Basic is included with a QuickBooks Online subscription at no separate fee. Premium and Elite are paid add ons that layer on approval workflows, more users and faster payment options.
| Tier | What it adds | Cost |
|---|---|---|
| Basic | Standard ACH payments, paper checks, vendor management, 1099 tracking, scheduling | Included with a QuickBooks Online subscription |
| Premium | More users, faster delivery options, expanded payment methods | Paid monthly add on |
| Elite | Bill approval workflows, roles and permissions, parallel approvals by up to five people | Paid monthly add on, and included with QuickBooks Online Advanced from August 1, 2026 |
Two things changed recently and are worth knowing before you budget. Intuit cut the Elite subscription price for new and renewing subscribers in June 2026, and from August 1, 2026 Elite is bundled into every QuickBooks Online Advanced subscription with no separate Elite fee. If you are on Advanced, check whether you are still being billed for Elite separately.
We are not publishing a per tier dollar figure here, and the reason is simple: reputable sources currently disagree about the standard ACH allowance on the Basic tier. Older documentation describes five free standard ACH payments a month with a per transaction fee after that, while 2026 coverage describes a $0 fee on standard ACH across all tiers for both new and existing customers. Rather than pick one, open Settings > Subscriptions and billing in your own company file, which shows the tier you are on and what it costs you.
Go to the Vendors menu and select Pay Bills. Choose whether to show bills due on or before a date or all bills, tick the bills you want to settle, apply any discount or credit with the Discount and Credit buttons, choose the payment account and method, then select Pay Selected Bills.
The payment method box is where Desktop differs from QuickBooks Online. Selecting Check gives you two options: To be printed, which queues the check for a print run, or Assign check number, which lets you type the number of a check you already wrote by hand. That second option is also the correct way to record a payment you made outside QuickBooks entirely, such as a wire or an ACH from your bank's own website. You can also pay bills by credit card, which posts the amount to the card liability rather than the bank account.
One warning specific to Desktop: writing a check from Banking > Write Checks to a vendor who has an open bill does not pay the bill. QuickBooks even warns you when the vendor has open payables. Cancel out and use Pay Bills instead.
Yes. The Pay bills screen is built for it. Tick every bill you want to settle, and QuickBooks groups them by vendor, so three open bills for the same vendor become one payment for the combined total rather than three separate withdrawals. Bills for different vendors stay as separate payments even though you approved them in one pass.
That grouping is helpful for the bank feed and confusing for reconciliation if you do not expect it. If your vendor sees one $4,200 ACH instead of three payments of $1,400, that is why. To keep them separate, pay each bill on its own from Expenses > Bills using the individual Make payment button.
In the Pay bills screen, overwrite the figure in the Payment column with the amount you are actually sending, then save. QuickBooks records a bill payment for that amount and leaves the remaining balance open on the bill, where it keeps aging in the Accounts Payable Aging report until you pay the rest. QuickBooks Desktop works the same way through the Amt. To Pay column.
Do not create a second smaller bill for the remainder. That doubles the expense and leaves you reconciling two documents against one vendor invoice. Partial payments belong on the original bill.
Record the credit first with + Create > Vendor credit, coding it to the same account or item as the original bill. Then open Pay bills, tick the bill, and QuickBooks shows the available credit in the Credit applied column. Accept it and the cash payment drops by that amount. In QuickBooks Desktop, use the Set Credits button in the Pay Bills window.
Here is the catch that costs people an afternoon: vendor credits cannot be applied inside a QuickBooks Bill Pay online payment. If you are scheduling the payment through Bill Pay, apply the credit to the bill first so the remaining balance is correct, then schedule the payment for what is actually left. Trying to net a credit against a Bill Pay ACH after the fact means unpicking both transactions.
To apply a credit without marking the bill fully paid, set the cash payment amount to zero and let the credit reduce the balance on its own. The bill stays open for the remainder.
Almost always because the payment was recorded as something other than a bill payment. A check, an expense or a bank feed transaction coded straight to an expense account moves the money but never links to the bill, so the bill stays open and the cost is now in your books twice. Open the bill, look at Related transactions in the right hand panel, and see whether a bill payment is linked at all.
You cannot simply flag a bill as paid, and that is deliberate. QuickBooks uses double entry accounting, so clearing a payable requires a matching credit somewhere. What you do instead is record a bill payment with no printed check: in QuickBooks Desktop pick Check then Assign check number and either type a reference such as ACH or wire, or leave it blank. In QuickBooks Online, run it through Pay bills against the correct payment account.
The one case that needs different treatment is an old bill that will never be paid, usually because the vendor wrote it off or the invoice was a duplicate. Voiding or deleting it removes the expense from the period it belongs to, which distorts a closed year. Ask your accountant whether a vendor credit dated in the current period is the cleaner route.
In QuickBooks Online, go to Reports and open Accounts payable aging summary for the total owed per vendor in 30, 60 and 90 day buckets, or Unpaid bills for a list of individual open bills with their due dates. In QuickBooks Desktop the same two reports are under Reports > Vendors & Payables.
Both reports depend entirely on the due date you entered on each bill, which is why the terms field is worth filling in. A file where every bill was saved with the default date shows a truthful total and useless aging.
Yes, and they catch people at the worst moment. Standard ACH payments through QuickBooks Bill Pay are capped per transaction, and there is a rolling limit on the total value you can process across a 30 day window that applies regardless of tier, with every scheduled payment counting toward it. Large vendor runs and payroll adjacent payments are where firms hit the ceiling.
The published caps have moved more than once, so treat any figure you read, including any you find quoted elsewhere on the web, as needing confirmation against your own account. Limits are also reviewed per customer and can be raised on request. If you are onboarding a client with heavy payables, verify the limits before the first payment run rather than during it.
Bills earn their keep when there is a gap between receiving something and paying for it. When there is no gap, a bill just creates a payable you have to remember to clear. These are the situations where experienced bookkeepers skip the bill entirely.
| What you are recording | Why a bill is the wrong tool | Use this instead |
|---|---|---|
| A card swipe or an ACH that already cleared | There is nothing owed, so the payable opens and closes on the same day and clutters A/P | An expense, or categorize the transaction in the bank feed |
| A recurring subscription paid automatically by card | You would create and clear a payable every month for money that leaves on its own | A recurring expense, or a bank rule on the bank feed transaction |
| Payroll | Payroll liabilities have their own accounts and tax treatment that A/P does not model | Payroll, or a journal entry from the payroll provider's period report |
| A credit card statement balance | The card is already a liability account. A bill would record the same debt twice | Enter the charges, then record a transfer to pay the card |
| Reimbursing an employee immediately in cash | Nothing is outstanding once the cash is handed over | An expense coded to the right account |
| A month of bank activity that never made it into QuickBooks | A summary bill has no payee detail and will never match the bank feed line by line | Import the actual statement transactions |
That last row is the one that quietly costs the most. It usually appears as a single catch up entry written to force a balance, and it breaks reconciliation for every month after it.
When the withdrawal downloads into the For review tab, QuickBooks looks for a bill payment already recorded for the same account, amount and approximate date, and offers it as a Match. Accept the match. Do not select Add and pick an expense category, because that creates a second transaction and leaves the bill payment unreconciled.
Two situations break the match. If you paid several bills for one vendor in a single run, the bank shows one combined withdrawal and QuickBooks needs to match it to the one grouped bill payment it created, which works, but the amounts will not line up with any individual bill. And if the payment date you entered is well away from the date the money actually moved, QuickBooks stops offering the match and you have to find it through Find match. Our guide to categorizing transactions in QuickBooks Online covers the For review tab in detail.
Then the payables workflow above has nothing to reconcile against, and no amount of careful bill entry fixes it. This is the normal state of a catch up engagement: the bills are known, the vendor invoices are in a folder, but the checking account has months of missing history because the bank feed only reaches back about 90 days, or the account was never connected, or the connection broke and nobody noticed.
Our converter reads the PDF or scanned bank statement, extracts every transaction with its date, description and amount, and exports a real .qbo file that QuickBooks Online and QuickBooks Desktop both accept through their normal import. Once those withdrawals are in the account, each one can be matched to the bill payment it settles, the reconciliation closes, and the Accounts Payable balance on the balance sheet finally agrees with what the bank actually paid out. Upload a statement at the top of this page and check the output before you commit to anything.
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