QuickBooks & Accounts Payable – How to solve the negative balances in A / P
Occasionally, there arises a negative balance in accounts payable (A / P), and business owners to look after their own books do not understand how the problem occurred or what to do. Here's the scoop:
A negative balance on A / P can sometimes mean that the invoices were entered, and checks were written against the Bills, but the original bills somehow got deleted or canceled. The bill-payment checks are left "hanging" in the system, creating a negative balance on A / P.
If there is a deficit in the A / P, or even if you have certain vendors that show a negative balance on the provider list, go to the Reports menu and select suppliers and accounts payable. Then select the bills outstanding detail report. Scan through the report and look for negative amounts. If you see any, double click them.
After double clicking, a bill-payment check to open. Watch the bottom half of the screen. Perhaps there will be no bill is here, not matter at all, nothing to indicate that this control was applied to a bill. If so, leave this window open, go to the menu and Suppliers. Select Enter Bills. Enter a bill for the provider you've just seen in the last screen. Be sure to use the same amount as you saw on the check. You have to guess the correct due date – better yet, try to locate the original bill so you can get the correct information from it. After entering it, and click Save again to leave the window open if you have more bills to enter, or Save and Close to close the window when finished.
After introducing the bill, the bill re-paycheck. Watch the bottom half of the screen – the bill should be there. If so, place a checkmark next to it, and write the correct amount (the amount on the check) in the right column. Click Save and Close. QuickBooks will ask if you are sure you want to save the transaction – click Yes
Go to the bills outstanding detail report and click Update. The bill-payment check, which caused the negative of this report, and will be gone. Follow these steps for all negative amounts in this paper.
Important: Please note that you do not pay the re-entered bills – you did not use the function to pay bills. The original bill payment checks were in the system, and simply apply controls on the re-entered in the accounts. If you accidentally re-entered back into bills, this will not solve the problem of having a negative balance on A / P.
If you see negative amounts which do have bills applied against them, which is an issue beyond the scope of this article.
