Accounts payable · 5 min
What bills still need to be paid?
Accounts payable is not just a stack of invoices on the dash. It is the map of what the business owes, when it is due, and whether cash will cover it.
Every contractor knows the feeling of a supplier calling about an invoice you were sure you had paid — or paying a bill twice because it lived in both email and the truck. Accounts payable (A/P) is the discipline of putting those bills in one place, dated, and aged, so “what do we owe?” is a report, not a search.
Why A/P ageing matters as much as A/R
The aged payables report mirrors receivables: current, 30, 60, 90+. It tells you which supplier invoices are coming due this week, which early-payment discounts you are about to miss, and which bills have slipped.
This is also how you stop cash surprises. A profitable month on the profit & loss can still bounce a payment if a large supplier invoice, insurance, or a GST instalment lands in the same week. Payables ageing is the calendar. The P&L is not.
What usually goes wrong
In QuickBooks Online, payables only work if bills are entered as bills — not as a pile of bank withdrawals categorized later. When everything is paid from the bank feed and never entered as a bill, you lose the due date, you lose the ageing, and you cannot tell a supplier what is open.
- Supplier bills paid from the bank feed with no bill attached
- Duplicate vendors (the same company entered two ways)
- Personal cards mixed with business payables
- Job materials sitting uncoded, so job cost is wrong too
A cleaner monthly rhythm
Enter bills when they arrive. Pay them through the pay-bills workflow (or match the payment to the bill). Reconcile the account. Then the ageing report can be trusted.
If your current process is “pay it when they chase us,” a catch-up or a Health Check is often the reset: get the open bills into the file, match what was already paid, and start the month with a real list.
