This article deals with resolving Accounts Payables balance conflicts with a vendor.

It is always a good idea to reach out to a major vendor from time to time and inquire as to the current open balance they show in their records. Be sure to match their open balance with your current payables balance for that vendor in your bookkeeping records. During this reconciliation process, you may have to make adjustments for:

• Payments you already processed to them but have not cleared your bank account yet.
• Bills they sent to you but you have not posted these new bills into your books yet.

However, if you have completed the reconciliation process and are still showing a discrepancy, then you may want to reach out to this vendor and ask for more information. Some of the common scenarios that may cause a bookkeeping records discrepancy between you and a vendor are:

• You sent to them an open ACH type of payment, but did not specify exactly which bills to apply this payment to (even worse is when they don’t even apply the ACH payment at all to anything).
• They emailed to you a bill a while back, but you somehow overlooked it.
• The vendor created the bill but did not email it to you.
• The vendor simply never cashed the check payment you mailed to them a while back.
• Very old payables or credit issues that remain open to this day.

In any case, the best thing to do here is try to ask the vendor for a detailed history of their “receivables” records for your account. Ask for a detailed history report instead of an open invoices report, that way you can verify exactly all of the payments you have ever sent to them and to be sure they actually did receive these payments into their bookkeeping records. If there are invoices in their records that you do not show in your records, then ask for these.

Reconciling detailed history reports will ultimately allow you to get to the bottom of things. Begin by reviewing everything going back one year to start. Then go back another year if you cannot locate the discrepancies from the most recent year. Keep going back one year until the issue is finally resolved.

Note: AccuraBooks is a bookkeeping firm only, so please consult with your C.P.A. for verification and clarification about the contents of this article.