Ask the Accountant…
Question: I have my bank and credit card data downloaded automatically, but I can’t find what I have paid to vendors. Can you help?
Answer: Automatic downloads of data from your bank and credit cards sound like it should be easy, but it’s not that simple. First, QB will assume that the entry that is downloaded should be put in a certain account. If it is new to your QBO, it may put it in the wrong account – sometimes a very incorrect account.
I saw a client who accepted a QB account suggestion, and a Leed’s $4,000 charge was put into “Meals and Entertainment” instead of “Cost of Goods Sold.” You need to be aware of your accounting and monitor it entry by entry. For that reason, I suggest that you don’t use automatic downloads until you learn how the system works and become familiar with your Chart of Accounts and how that works. Ultimately, you might not use the automatic downloads at all.
As to your specific issue, I suspect that you are not filling in the “Payee” field of each transaction that you are categorizing in the automatic downloads. For instance, if you are trying to track what you have paid Intuit/QuickBooks, and you have not filled in the Payee field, you will not be able to see what was paid to them. Once QBO learns where the transactions from a certain payee go, the Payee field will be automatically entered. Until then, you must train QBO.
Please email accounting questions you would like considered for the column to [email protected] with the subject line of “Ask the Accountant”.
