Manage your Accounts Payable & Bill Payments
Welcome
This seminar will teach you everything you need to build a database in Microsoft Access to manage your Accounts Payable and Bill Payments for your small business or personal finances.
This seminar was developed because most of my other Access courses and seminars deal with managing the "in" part of your finances (invoicing your customers, tracking their payments, and so on). This seminars covers the "out" part of the equation.
If you have ever wanted to keep track of your bills and accounts payable, but find other "canned" financial programs too limiting for your accounting needs, this seminar is for you. Here is the perfect opportunity to custom-tailor a database solution for your needs. Don't change your business to meet the needs of your software. Your software should adapt to your business methods.
Resources
Main Seminar Goals
- Track payees / vendors and all related data
- View account balances at a glance
- Enter invoices and bills, including recurring bills
- Process payments for each bill, even multiples
- Print checks right from the database
- Assign payment terms to vendors
- Calculate discounts like 2%10 NET 30
- Generate reports such as an aged accounts payable
Topics Covered
We will begin by creating a form to track your payees. A payee is anyone to whom you send money, such as a vendor or service provider.
You can assign each payee a default payment type (check, online BillPay, credit card, cash, and so on). You can also assign each payee a category (utilities, car payments, rent, etc.) and specify payment terms (NET10, due on receipt, etc.). You can also specify a priority for each payee - so you can pay the URGENT bills (like your mortgage) quickly.
You will be able to view all of your payees at a glance. You will see the total amount you owe them, how much of that is past due, the date of their last bill, and the date of your last payment to them. You can sort on any of these columns. You can hide inactive payees (companies you no longer do business with, for example).
You can add bills for each payee. Enter the amount, and the Bill Date defaults to today's date. The Due Date is automatically calculated based on your terms with that vendor.
When you're done entering bills, you'll see a summary of all of the bills for each payee on their Payee screen, along with a total balance. You can sort by any column.
Double-click on any one of the bills listed in the box above, and it opens up the Bill Detail form where you can see more information about this bill, such as the balance, any payments made, discounts taken, and so on.
To pay this bill, just click on the Make Payment button. The database will ask how much of this bill you want to pay. Enter the amount and click OK.
Your payment will then be noted on the Payment form. You can make multiple payments for one bill / invoice.
In addition to entering bills, you can also use the Bill List form to get a quick look at what you owe. It will show the vendor, due dates, amount of the bill, and highlight something that's past due.
There is also a Bill Summary form that displays all of this information in addition to the balance due and vendor priority.
You can sort this list by any column. You can also filter the list to show bills that are due now, due in 7 days, past due, and so on. You can also decide to see paid or unpaid bills.
Use the QuickPay Selected Bill feature to automatically enter in a full payment for the selected bill. You can do this to quickly go down the list of bills that are due and pay them all with one click.
If the system notices you qualify for a discount on one of your bills, it will prompt you. You can choose whether or not to accept the discount.
You can enter recurring bills that get automatically added to your list of bills to pay at regular intervals (weekly, monthly, quarterly, etc.).
You'll see a warning message on the Main Menu if you have payments to process, or recurring bills that need to be added to the system.
When it's time to sit down and process your payments, you can limit the list based on the payment method. For example, you can pick BillPay to show all of the items that you need to go onto your bank's web site to pay online.
Click on View Payment Report to print out a report showing all of your payments broken down by vendor, date, and payment amount.
When you're done processing your payments, click on the Mark Visible Payments as Processed button to indicate that you have sent out these payments. Optionally, you can click on the check boxes to mark/unmark these items as processed.
You can use the database to print checks on your printer. Click on the Print Checks button. Any payments for the same vendor will be consolidated onto the same check.
Yes, we'll even use a function to turn $18.97 into "Eighteen Dollars and Ninety Seven Cents."
And, of course, there are several different reports you can generate.
You can print an Aged Accounts Payable report showing how much is owed to each payee, how much is past due, and coming due in the next 30 days.
You can generate a report showing total expenses between two dates.
You can create a pie chart showing expenses by payee category between two dates.
Again, this seminar is perfect for anyone who wants to learn how to build a Microsoft Access database to manage payables for a small business or your own personal finances. You will be able to track payees, vendors, bills, payments, and more when you're finished with this seminar.
This seminar is very long - almost eleven (11) hours - but it's broken up into easily managed lessons of about 10 minutes each. You can sit down, watch a lesson, review the material, test the code out yourself, and experiment. Do a little bit each day. It's long, but it's comprehensive - you won't miss a single step as I've recorded everything from start to finish.
Of course, if you have any questions about whether or not this seminar is for you, please contact me.
Pre-Requisites
This is a Developer-Level Seminar. There will be a lot of VBA. It is strongly recommended that you have completed my entire Access Beginner and Expert series. My Developer 1 class is highly recommended so you understand the basics of programming in VBA. If not, at least watch my free Intro to VBA video.
Version
I am using Access 2007 in this seminar, however the lessons are perfectly valid for all versions of Access from 2003 and later. It's currently 2022 and I just recently verified that everything in this seminar still works with Access 2019 and Office 365.
Enroll Today
Enroll now so that you can watch these lessons, learn with us, post questions, and more.
Questions?
Please feel free to post your questions or comments below. If you are not sure as to whether or not this product will meet your needs, I'd rather help you before you buy it. Remember, all sales are final. Thank you.
Keywords
microsoft access accounts payable, accounting, payee, category, bills, bill payment, data entry, payments, balances, open bills, process payments, recurring, currency to english, paying bills, bill pay, vendors, invoices, payees, recurring bills, payment terms, pie chart, expenses
