QuickBooks

How to Pay Bills in QuickBooks Online (Entering and Paying, Start to Finish)

Enter the vendor bill first (+ New > Bill), then pay it from a separate screen (+ New > Pay bills), where you select which open bills to cover, pick the account the money comes from, and confirm the date. QuickBooks keeps these as two steps on purpose, so a bill can sit as a recorded liability before cash actually moves. Here's the full sequence from entry through payment.

The full walkthrough

1. Enter the bill. Click + New, then Bill under the Vendors column. Pick the vendor, enter the bill date and due date, and add each expense line with its category and amount. Save it. At this point the bill exists as an unpaid liability; nothing has been paid yet.

2. Open the Pay Bills screen. Click + New again, then Pay bills, also under Vendors. This is a different screen from the one you used to enter the bill, and it only shows bills that are still open.

3. Select which bills to pay. Check the box next to each open bill you want to cover in this run. You can pay several vendors in one pass, or just one.

4. Set the payment account and date. Choose the bank account the payment comes from and the date it should post. For a bill you're only paying partially, you can edit the payment amount down from the full balance due.

5. Choose how the payment goes out, then save. Pick Check if you're printing or writing a physical check, or use QuickBooks Bill Pay if you want QuickBooks to send the payment electronically (ACH) or print and mail a check on your behalf for a fee. Save the batch and QuickBooks marks each selected bill as paid, in full or in part.

Where the two-step process starts costing real time

Splitting entry from payment is good design for a handful of vendors. It gets heavier once a business is tracking dozens of open bills across different due dates, payment terms, and approval rules, because someone still has to sit down, open the Pay Bills screen, and decide which ones are actually due this week.

That decision usually depends on more than what's sitting in QuickBooks. A bill might be entered correctly but waiting on a manager's approval, or tied to a job that hasn't been confirmed complete yet, or flagged because the vendor's invoice doesn't match what was ordered. None of that context lives on the Pay Bills screen; it lives in someone's head, an email thread, or a separate approval tool.

QuickBooks won't tell you which bills are safe to pay today. It just shows you what's open and lets a person make the call, the same way, every pay run.

What we've built on top of QuickBooks bill pay

Bills that enter themselves from a vendor email

A vendor invoice arrives by email and the bill gets created in QuickBooks automatically, vendor matched, line items and category filled in, without someone retyping it from a PDF.

Approval gates before anything hits Pay Bills

A bill over a set amount, or from a vendor that isn't yet approved, gets routed to a manager first. It only shows up as ready to pay once someone has actually signed off, instead of the Pay Bills screen trusting every open bill the same way.

What slows down your bill-pay run every week?

Tell us where the holdup actually is, getting bills entered, deciding what's due, or waiting on an approval, and we'll tell you if it can run with less hands-on time.

Let's talk

Spending real time on vendor bills every pay cycle?

Tell us how a bill moves through your business today, from the moment it arrives to the moment it's paid, and we'll tell you honestly what's left for a person to decide. Bill pay is just one workflow; the same question is worth asking about anything else you're still doing by hand.

Let's talk

Frequently Asked Questions

How do I pay multiple bills with one check or payment in QuickBooks?+

On the Pay Bills screen, select several open bills from the same vendor and QuickBooks combines them into a single payment and a single check number, rather than cutting one per bill. Bills from different vendors can't be combined into one payment this way.

How do I pay a bill with a credit card in QuickBooks Online?+

On the Pay Bills screen, choose the credit card account as the payment account instead of a bank account. This records the bill as paid and adds the charge to the card's balance, which you'd then pay down separately like any other credit card expense.

How do I undo or reverse a bill payment in QuickBooks?+

Open the bill payment from the vendor's transaction list and select More, then Delete. This unmarks the bill as paid and puts it back into the open bills list; it does not undo the actual bank transaction if the money already left your account, so you'd need to handle that separately if the payment genuinely didn't go through.

What's the difference between entering a bill and paying it directly as an expense?+

Entering a bill records what you owe before you pay it, which keeps your Accounts Payable accurate if there's a delay between getting billed and actually paying. Recording something as an Expense instead assumes payment happens the same moment, with no open balance in between. Use a bill whenever there's a real gap between being billed and paying.