Note: Be sure you understand what information to enter for both payment and 1099 purposes.

1. Go to your vendor center in QuickBooks Online (Expenses>Vendors) and then click “New Vendor” in the upper right corner.
2. You will notice the fields First, Middle, Last name AND also the Company AND the field “Display name as”:
   1. For payment purposes, the check payment will either print to the Display Name or use the name you enter into the field “Print on check as”.
   2. For 1099 purposes, the 1099 form will extract the information from both the First, Middle, Last name fields AND Company field. This is fine for sole proprietorships and single-member LLC companies, however, for anything else, you only want to list the actually Company name only on the 1099 form, which then you will have to temporarily delete the information in the First, Middle, Last name fields in order for the 1099 to print correctly.
   3. “Notes” field: this is useful if you want to remember what type of business structure your vendor is, especially for 1099 purposes in the future. These notes will also be displayed in the master vendor profile list so you don’t have to click on each vendor’s name to open up their profile just to see important notes regarding that vendor.
   4. The remaining fields should be pretty self-explanatory EXCEPT for the one called “Opening balance”:
      1. DO NOT ever put anything into this field. If you are migrating from another bookkeeping system, simply enter in any current vendor balances (including credits) by simply creating vendor bills and/or credit memos (whatever was open from your previous bookkeeping system). This will make any potential audit/financial trail easier to track and understand.