Import bills against existing purchase orders

Axis

Overview

In QuickBooks it is possible to receive items on a bill (but not item receipts) against an existing purchase order and create a link between the two transactions, this is also possible when importing bills when using Zed Axis.

 
Link Purchase Order to Bill

You can choose either to link the bill entirely to the purchase order or link individual lines on the bill to the purchase order

To link a Bill to an entire Purchase Order

This approach requires you to map the field called Link To Purchase Order along with the Vendor Name, a bill will be created out of the whole existing Purchase Order and the line items will be taken from the Purchase Order and added to the Bill in full and a link between the Purchase Order and the Bill will be created.  You do not need to list the line items on the bill as these will be automatically drawn from the Purchase Order

To link a Bill to part of or individual lines on a Purchase Order.

If you want to only bill against some lines on a purchase order or only for some of the quantities on a purchase order then you should use the Line Link To Purchase Order field to specify the Purchase Order and you will need to included the line items and quantities in the same order as they appear on the Purchase Order.

To link a bill to a purchase order in the invoice mapping select the field called Link To Purchase Order and map that to the column in your import file which contains the Reference number of the Purchase Order you wish to link to.  When the bill is imported a link will be created between the two transactions.

Points to consider:
  • The vendor on the purchase order should match the vendor on the bill otherwise QuickBooks will return and error
  • The full name of the items on the purchase order should match those on the bill and be in the same order

Want to link Bills to Item Receipts?

In QuickBooks you can create a Bill from an Item Receipt (ie convert or progress), and if there was a link from the Item Receipt to the Purchase Order once this then this is carried over to the Bill but there is no way to link a Bill to an Item Receipt, since using this method essential converts the item receipt to a bill.  If you want to recreate that using Zed Axis then the recommend approach is to first export out the Item Receipts to Excel and then Delete them, then in the second step import the exported item receipts as Bills and link the bill to the associated purchase orders.
Article ID: 196, , Modified: 6/28/2022 at 4:19 AM

Feedback

When I do this, it is duplicating all of the line items. Is there a way to prevent this?
Jeff (2/20/2015 at 5:28 PM)
Hi Jeff, if you are linking then you only need to import one line with the linking as it automatically pulls the items from the purchase order.
Steve (3/18/2015 at 4:11 AM)
With our distributors, the various items on a single PO may be spread across multiple bills (based on when they ship). Is it possible to link the bill to an existing PO while specifying specific items and quantities?
Ricky (4/5/2017 at 4:04 PM)
We have the same needs. Will this be an option soon?
Alexis Komondorea (9/27/2017 at 8:44 PM)
Any update on this? We have over 60 POs that are supposed to be split among 135 various bills depending on when each individual item was received and billed. Putting in the link to PO shouldn't automatically load all items from the PO into the bill. Or there should be another field to import PO link per item.
Will (7/17/2018 at 11:17 PM)
Is there any way to create a single bill of items I'm receiving from multiple POs?
Lianne Perez (8/29/2016 at 2:39 PM)
Hi Lianne, At the moment there is a bug in the QuickBooks API that will not permit us to Link a Bill to Multiple Purchase Orders, until this is resolved we can only do one Bill to One PO. Sorry,
Steve (11/24/2016 at 6:24 AM)
Has there been a resolution to this QuickBooks API bug?
Daniel Sossaman (3/24/2017 at 12:09 PM)

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