Paying Vendor bills with your credit card

Many businesses like to pay their bills with their credit cards.  Especially, if your credit card company offers a reward program, it is beneficial to pay the bills by credit card to get the "perks".  But if you need to track the vendor bills and reference numbers on the bills, how do you enter them into accounts payable and pay them by credit card instead of a business check?

Here is how you do it:

Make sure you have your credit card account properly set up on the chart of accounts.

Next, go to vendor, pay bills screen.  Change the checking account at the bottom of the screen to your credit card and select your credit card you are using from the drop down list.

Then select to pay your bills. Click pay now and save and close.  This will create the same type of transaction as if you were entering them directly into banking, enter credit card charges, but it will flow it through the accounts payable module.  You will be able to track the vendor bills just as you would if you paid by a business check.   You can go to banking, enter credit card charges, select your credit card at the top and click previous to see the transactions created by the above steps.

 

Quick tip: Make sure the next time you do go to pay your bills by check, that you change the bottom drop down list from the credit card to the checking account again.  QuickBooks "remembering" feature will default it to the last payment type used (which was credit card).  If you forget to change it back to checking, you will have to delete the credit card transactions entries made by the payment by credit card and then go back to pay them again by check.

Courtesy of our colleague Lynda Artesani, Certified QuickBooks ProAdvisor in SW Florida