QuickBooks How To: Bulk Clean-Up of Unbilled Expenses

Do your books need to undergo some clean-up? Sometimes when it comes to cleaning up your books, it can be overwhelming and you won’t know where to start - especially if you’re switching from one system to another. For instance, if you make the switch from QuickBooks Desktop to Online, you might notice some billable expenses that hadn’t been used. Sometimes we mark expenses as billable, but never end up billing for them. These old, unbilled expenses add clutter to your books and increase the invoice loading time. 

To clean-up these unused billable expenses, select Customers & Leads from your QBO menu. There is a tracker at the top of this page that highlights your customers’ invoice activity including paid, unpaid, overdue, and unbilled expenses in the last 365 days. 

If you select Unbilled Activity, it will tell you the exact number of unbilled activities you have. If this number is fairly low, you can go into each unbilled activity and deselect the “billable” box. However, if this number is high, it wouldn’t be time efficient to manually update each unbilled item individually and manually. This would require time and energy that could be better used elsewhere! 

To clean-up these billable expenses, go to the URL at the top of the page. It is currently: https://app.qbo.intuit.com/app/customers and you will instead type in: https://app.qbo.intuit.com/app/managebillableexpense and hit enter. 

A page titled “Hide Unbilled Expenses” will pop-up. This page prompts you to include a date and QuickBooks will mark all unbilled expenses created prior to that date as closed. It’s vital to be confident this is what you want to do before you do it, because there is not a way to automatically reverse this without adding manual work and a massive headache. 

Once you enter the date, click save. Then, go back to your Customers & Leads page. You should see an instant update to the quantity of unbilled expenses. It’s important to note that doing this will not affect your reporting. 

In addition, this does not apply to time charge activities. It works for bills, checks, and other expenses, but not time charges. To remove the time charge expenses from the unbilled activity area, go back to the Customers & Leads page and select the customer these charges are for, and select “start invoice.” The time charges will show up in the invoice - change this rate to 0. This will create an invoice with $0 balance due - do not send this to the customer; this is for internal use only, to clean-up your books. Then, hit “save and close.” Once that is completed or the remaining unbilled activities, these will be removed and cleaned up from your books. 

To watch the above steps being done: https://www.youtube.com/embed/TWrEtcV6WBo