Removing billable expenses that are no longer wanted or going to be invoiced is really easy to do in QuickBooks Online (QBO).  There are a number of reasons you may want to do this to a file.  Maybe they are old billable transactions from customers that you no longer service.  Or maybe they are recurring customers but the expenses are from jobs that you did not add billable expenses to back when they were entered. Or perhaps you did not know you had these hanging billable expenses in QuickBooks desktop but you recently converted a file and now they show up each time you invoice your customer.  Annoying! 

Billable expenses….what are they?

They are the expenses that are incurred by you on behalf of your customer in performing some work, services or supplies. You can mark bills, checks, expenses, etc. as billable, and can later be applied to invoices. They will show up as an expense on your books and as income when invoiced.  It is a great feature to remind you to bill them back to your customer. In QuickBooks Online, they show up and you cannot miss them.  In  QuickBooks desktop, you can easily inadvertently select to add them by using the tab key.  You may not even know they are there.

Billable expenses….turning on the feature in QBO

To turn on “Use Billable Expenses” preference so you can start recording billable transactions such as bills and checks:

1. Select the Gear icon then Company Settings (or Account and Settings).
2. Go to the Expenses tab on the left.
3. In the Bills and expenses section, check the Edit icon.
4. Put a check mark on the Make expenses and items billable box.
5. Select Save.

Removing them from the QuickBooks Online file

​First step is to make sure that all accounts that were used in billable expenses are active.  This includes accounts on your chart of accounts from days gone by, you will not be able to do the removal until you reactivate them.  

The next step is done by a simple URL.  Just log into the file you want to do this too (remember, this is not something you can “undo” so be sure to backup your QuickBooks Online file.  See this post for more details on the app Chronobooks).  Then in the url spot at the top of the page, replace the one for your file with this one:  http://qbo.intuit.com/app/managebillableexpense . Add your date range and one click and you are there!

Now you should be able to clean up the customer list…

​​Once this task is done, you should be able to remove old customer’s from the customer list.  If they had billable expenses you could not remove them easily.  Just this simple step can do a major cleanup in the file.  

If you have any questions or would like to see a future video on another topic, please reach out to me on Facebook.   PS:  Why the donut?  To tempt you? To tease you?  No, I had a donut today for the first time in many, many years.  It looked like this one, so I decided to add it here.  There were no “billable expense” pics anyway and this one is far more interesting….right?  🙂