How to record a bill payment in Microsoft Office Small Business Accounting for a manually written check (898559)

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To record the payment, you must use the Pay Bills dialog box. Bills cannot be applied to the payment in the Check dialog box.

To record a bill payment for a manually written check, follow these steps. This procedure assumes that the check has already been manually written.

1. Create a bill by clicking Enter Bills on the Vendors menu.
   
   Small Business Accounting credits the Accounts Payable account and debits one of the following:
   • The expense account that is associated with a non-inventory item
   • The inventory asset that is associated with an inventory item
   • The accounts that are selected on the Expense lines
2. On the Banking menu, click Write Checks.
3. In the Bank account list, click the account from which the check was manually written.
4. In the Pay to list, click the vendor that you paid.
5. In the Amount field, type the amount that you paid.
6. Make sure that the To be printed check box is cleared.
7. Click Save and Close.
   
   Note In steps 2 through 7, Small Business Accounting debits the Accounts Payable account and credits the bank account that you selected in step 3.
   
8. To apply the payment to the bill, click Pay Bills on the Banking menu.
9. In the Pay from list, click an account. In the Payment method list, click a method.
   
   Note The selections that you make in these two lists do not matter unless you want to include payments for other outstanding bills. For information about these two options, see Small Business Accounting Help.
10. In the Pay column, click to select the check box for the bill that you created in step 1.
11. In the Apply column, click Credits to display the available credits.
12. Click to select the check box for the payment that you entered in steps 2 to 7, and then click Adjust to apply the selected payment to the selected bill.
    
    If you do not want to make a payment for other outstanding bills, the amount in the Amount box will appear as $0.00.
13. Click Save and Close.
    
    Note Unless payments to other outstanding bills are included, the actions that you take to complete steps 8 through 13 do not affect the general ledger.
    
    If you do not follow steps 8 through 14, you may experience an issue where the vendor balance appears as $0.00 but where the Pay Bills dialog box contains outstanding bills.
    
    For more information about how to apply the outstanding customer credits or payments to the unpaid invoices, click the following article number to view the article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base:

    897879 You may notice that a vendor's balance is zero even though that vendor has outstanding bills in the Pay Bills window in Small Business Accounting