Problems Reporting on Purchase Orders?

We recently switched over from a manual purchase order system to using the one in Quickbooks. I am seeing one problem that I think creates a large business process problem. I have no way to see those purchase orders that have been received but not paid.

I realize that there is a function to Enter Bill for Received Items. The problem is that sometimes the person entering the bill either doesn't know how the vendor's name is entered, or doesn't realize that the item is not received. They end up creating Bills that are not tied to the purchase orders. This creates the following problems:

1) You have no independent check on whether you are meeting your obligations. If the vendor forgets to invoice you (and many do), you end up not paying them in time. I would like to have visbility in a report on such situations. The other side of that is that you may accidentally pay the same vendor twice.

2) There no way to verify that the amounts paid match up against the amounts you were supposed to pay. A vendor could overcharge and there is no management visibility against that, unless you want to micro manage your payables and personally follow through the chain of transaction for every purchase you do. That takes too much time. It's not an efficient way to manage.

As a way of maintaining good financial controls, it would also be useful to have a report that shows all Bills (paid and unpaid) that have no purchase order against them.

We use QB 2004. Has any of this changed in QB 2005?

Reply to
Will
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You ment to say invoiced (billed) , didn't you?

Dream on tampon. Do you really think we believe that bullshit. Your vendors forget to bill you and that is a problem? I should have such problems. As far as the staff not knowing the name of the vendor or entering invoices without a receiving report certainly sounds like a Quickbooks bug.

I would like to have

The invoice you never received gets paid twice. For sure dude. I triple pay invoices I never receive.

Again don't you mean amounts invoiced (billed) ? In any event these are controls that are internal to your organization and have absolutly nothing to do with the software or manual system in place. Sound like an idiot is in charge.

A vendor could

Agreed, just pay what ever they charge you for. Forget about any agreed upon price, can't mico manage, to timely. No time to say hello , goodbye, I'm late, I'm Late, I'm late. I'm also broke.

You were a moron back in version 2004 and you still are in version 2005. Nothing ever changes.

Folks, don't you just love this guy?

Reply to
Allan Martin

Have you looked at the Open Purchase Orders report found under Reports>>Purchases?

I think you need to examine your ordering process. If you always use Purchase Orders then the person entering the bill should be given the PO. No PO, No bill is entered into the system. This would eliminate the problem of the person not knowing how the vendor's name is entered. Once you improve the flow of paperwork, I think the other issues will resolve themselves.

Reply to
Laura

I don't have 2005 version. I suspect, however, nothing will change. It is not a QB problem, it is an internal office procedures problem.

Many times folks think if they use a software program to 'keep track' of things, internal problems will disappear. They will not. Oftentimes, they are magnified. If your office staff was able to keep track of the PO's and bills manually, they SHOULD be able to do the same within QB.

To address your points:

--It is not reasonable to expect that software will detect that the user doesn't know vendor names or whether items have been recieved against specific PO's.

--It is not reasonable to expect that software will preclude entering bills without PO's. Many vendor bills are not tied to items (rent and utilities come to mind) and many companies purchase items without using PO's. YOU, however, can instruct your office staff that no bill is to be entered into the system without a PO, if that is your desire.

--It is not reasonable to expect that software will know your purchase orders have resulted in bills to your vendors -- whether items have been recieved or not.

--It is not reasonable to expect that software will know you've entered duplicate bills for a vendor. (Although there is a safeguard, see below).

--It is not reasonable to expect that software will know whether items have been received at the time of billing.

--It is not reasonable to expect that software will prevent vendor overrcharges.

There *ARE* safeguards set up in the program to help prevent user error. It is up to you to set forth an office procedure that doesn't interfere with the safeguards. Here's how: Set a few controls. There is no excuse for the person entering bills or PO's not knowing "how the vendor's name is entered". Instruct your office staff that only one person can enter vendors. Any time anyone else enters a bill, they must use the pull down vendor list. Just this one modification will enable the safeguards that exist within QB.

When a staff member uses the 'Enter Bills' screen and selects a vendor different 'safeguards' are automatically enabled by QB.

1) If open purchase orders exist for a vendor, a WARNING will show. The person entering the bills will be given the opportunity to recieve against one or more open purchase orders. 2) If items have been recieved (Item receipts) there will be a different warning telling the person that there are pending item reciepts and that they should go to the vendors menu and use the 'enter bill for rec'd items' screen INSTEAD of the enter bills screen. What this does is bring up a window with a choice of item receipts. Highlight the one you want, and the Item Reciept is changed to a bill. Notice that the only difference between an Item Receipt and a Bill is the box that says 'Bill Received'. 3) Consistent use of the reference number on the enter bills screen will cause a warning for duplicate bills.

As to wanting "a report that shows all Bills (paid and unpaid) that have no purchase order against them ", have you checked the QB template gallery? I found one here

formatting link
'Bill History for the Previous Month'. Sounds like it might be what you are looking for.

Reply to
L

Yes, of course. Try receiving against a purchase order but do not create a bill for it. The purchase order disappears from the open purchase order list. That's the essence of the problem. There is a state between receiving the PO and creating the bill for the PO, and I'm trying to examine just the POs in that intermediate state.

always use

given the PO. No

the problem of

you improve

themselves.

For the vast majority of the POs, this is the way it works and there is no problem. When the vendor doesn't invoice, your suggestion doesn't help. Another use case where this has been a problem is when we must prepay an order by wire, before it is received. In this case we end up creating a checking account entry for the wire without tying it to the PO. When the order is received, the PO is "received" in Quickbooks. We ideally like to go back and then create a bill against the received item, then pay this bill backdated to the original wire transfer date. The original wire transfer entry is then deleted to avoid duplication. That's the only way I can find to establish a complete paper trail for the PO. But occasionally we do forget to go back and pay the original wire via a bill against the received item. Having a report of the purchase orders that have been "received" but not yet billed would help us find those isolated cases in a robust way.

Reply to
Will

the user

against

I agree. Where did I ask for that feature? You are making up a strawman to attack.

What I asked for was a specific report that would help to uncover some specific errors, that's all.

entering bills

utilities

PO's. YOU,

entered into

Again, I agree with you. Again, you are making points I did not make. I never asked for the system to prevent creating bills without POs.

purchase

have been

What is the premise that proves that conclusion? You don't advance a valid argument, and you don't define your premises in any case.

If I go into a PO that has a Bill written against it, and I click the History button at the top, QB most certainly does know about the Bill written against that PO!! I'm not asking for any information that isn't there. I'm asking to expose that information in a report, across all of the POs, not in isolation of a specific PO. It should be possible for the system to enumerate those purchase orders where both of the following conditions exist:

1) The purchase order has been received (i.e., the existence of an Item Receipt as shown by the History button) 2) The purchase order has no Bill (i.e., the History button does not show a Bill against the PO)

entered

see below).

True enough. That one is hard to argue.

whether items have

The software does know it. Try using the History button from your POs after you receive them or bill against them.

Again, I'm not asking for information that isn't in the system. I am asking for a specific presentation of the information that is already there.

vendor

I didn't ask for the software to prevent overcharges. But the software can certainly help a manager to see the purchase orders that never followed through to the billing stage. That at least focuses how one spends time in investigating details.

bills or PO's

office staff

enters a bill,

modification will

Sounds simple, but in reality the problem of finding vendors can be complex. Suppose you have a vendor that is a division of GE named Bay4. If you receive a payment from them through PayPal, they are:

PayPal *BAY4C

If you receive a payment from them via credit card directly they are:

Bay 4 Capital 800-555-1212

If you pay them directly, the purchase order represents them as:

General Electric Financial - Bay 4

but they want the payment to be to:

Bay 4 Capital

I have one supplier that is a large multinational bank, and I have Vendor entries for them based on whether we are buying equipment from them in Sweden, in Switzerland, in the U.S., or in Asia. It's not such a hard thing to understand that occasionally people will refer to the wrong entity on a PO and that this can cause confusion that needs to be sorted out internally later.

screen will

That is very helpful to know about. Thanks.

that have no

gallery? I

formatting link
called 'Bill History for the Previous Month'. Sounds like itmight be what

That is a great resource to know about thank you. That report is not the one I wanted, but I'll be sure to poke around in that site looking at the various reports.

I have never used the QBR file format before. How does one add those reports into the Quickbooks environment?

Reply to
Will

way

Yes, thank you.

your

Your vendors

problems. As

invoices

bug.

You know, usually your responses are easy to ignore because they are just annoying. They all follow the same pattern:

1) Make sure to trivialize every problem without ever asking any question or trying to understand any detail.

2) Make flippant remarks. Be as negative as possible. Make sure to reduce every person's experience of the world to your personal inexperience.

3) Make sure to repetitively end the conversation without ever answering the question or addressing the issue.

As a matter of fact we do have vendors who consistently fail to invoice us. I have one that is a company doing about $20M a year in sales that routinely does multi-million purchases from corporations liquidating assets. They then fail to inventory the product in a form that they can advertise all of it. They are poorly organized internally, and basic things like sending invoices seem to escape them. Yet they make phenomenal profits. They have gross margins that are obscene, and those profits protect them from their internal process deficiencies. There are companies with profitable businesses that do not have good internal process, just as there are companies with phenomenal internal process and lousy businesses.

As a matter of fact, yes, I not only want to pay our invoices on time, but I want to be so in touch with our internal processes that I know about financial obligations we have to other companies, even when they are too incompetent to execute well and send us an invoice. That avoids the appearance from their side that we do not pay timely, and I simply see no harm in having that level of control and information about what we do.

Unfortunately, on Planet Pompous, or whatever place you come from, there are no such vendors. Everyone executes perfectly. Everyone has perfect business processes and perfect business acumen. Everyone is perfectly happy with the perfect Quickbooks software, and anyone who isn't happy is obviously just a moron.

The rest of your arrogant post I won't respond to because nothing you say is important enough to warrant the effort. Your responses are unprofessional, unthoughtful, and simply do nothing to progress anyone's knowledge of anything.

I would greatly appreciate it if you would stop responding to my posts at all. Please don't bring your negative energy vortex into my field of view. I would prefer to keep my brief moments online to exchanges of facts and ideas. I am happy to receive constructive criticism from those who are trying to contribute something positive.

Reply to
Will

You were given constructive advice when you first showed up on this newsgroup several months ago but failed to listen to the pearls of wisdom bestowed upon you. Quickbooks is not the software solution your company requires. Try as you might, it will never meet your needs. By the way your moments are anything but brief and are quite numerous. It is one thing to ask for help on an occasional basis but you have been a pig about it. You have taken advantage of our good nature and fed at the public trough all to often.

Reply to
Allan Martin

Hmm, I HAVE downloaded these templates in the past, but interestingly, it is not working now. Even more interesting, if you click on 'home' for the link I gave you it gives a new updated QB website, without the 'resources' tab.

Wonder if Intuit has 'shut down' or is hiding the report template option? Not to sound paranoid or anything, but things DO change. The resources are certainly not available on the new website site map, and downloading is not working.

Gonna start a new thread -- I'm interested in knowing how to use this now.

Reply to
L

Allan, per an earlier post, you are confusing two different posters who both sign with the name 'Will'. Please look for my signature to have the mail domain under my name, as per below. Other posts coming every few days from a person who signs just Will are from a different person, different state, no affiliation with me.

Reply to
Will

The sages, when asked how they could be sure that Moses wrote the Torah, replied: "The Torah may very well have been written by someone other than Moses, who, coincidentally, was also named Moses."

Reply to
HeyBub

Change your name.

Reply to
GWB

I was thinking Moses would be a nice change of pace actually. :)

Reply to
Will

You are right I thought the other Will was you. Sorry Will.

Reply to
Allan Martin

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