Your accounts receivable person has handed in their notice, or left without much of one, or is out for three weeks. Checks keep arriving, ACH emails keep landing in an inbox nobody's reading, and every day those payments sit unapplied, your AR aging gets a little less true. In most businesses the cover is an outside bookkeeper, a temp or someone in finance working beside their own job. Whoever it is needs a list of how each customer pays, and one rule for QuickBooks Online: apply a payment only to the invoices its remittance names.
What stops when the AR person goes
Applying payments looks like one task, but the person doing it was holding several. They knew which mailbox each customer's remittance arrived in, which portals had to be checked on which days, and which customers quote a PO number instead of an invoice number. They also knew who short-pays out of habit. Very little of that is written down anywhere, because it never needed to be.
When it stops, the damage is quiet at first. Deposits still reach the bank, but the payments behind them go unrecorded or sit on the customer as unapplied credits, so invoices that have been paid still show as open. Automatic reminders go to customers who've already paid, collections calls chase the wrong balances, and the month-end bank reconciliation stops tying out. The longer it runs, the harder it is to work out which payment belonged to which invoice. It's often noticed from the outside first, when a customer calls to ask why they've gotten a reminder for an invoice they paid weeks ago.
Who covers: a bookkeeper, a temp or someone internal
Each option suits a different gap. An outside bookkeeper who already does your month-end knows your QuickBooks file but not your customers, which suits a gap of a few weeks. A temp suits a fixed gap with a clear end date, as long as someone checks their first few batches. Someone in finance knows the customers but has a job of their own, which works when volumes are low or the gap is short.
Any of them can apply payments, but each starts without the payer knowledge, and the common mistake under pressure is applying a payment to the wrong invoice because the amount happened to fit. That error shows up weeks later rather than when it's made, as an invoice the customer says is paid, or at year end, when the balances don't agree.
So whoever covers needs two things: a written list of how each customer pays, which the payer list section below builds, and a rule that a payment only gets applied to invoices the remittance actually names. Anything that doesn't match cleanly waits for someone who can check it, rather than being forced to fit. An outside bookkeeper should get their own access, invited from the accountant section of Manage users, rather than a shared login, so the audit log still shows who posted what.
Week one: find every place payments arrive
Start with an inventory, not with the backlog. Before anyone applies a single payment, list every route money and remittance detail take into the business:
- Mailboxes. Every address customers send remittances to, including the departing person's own mailbox, which should be forwarded rather than closed, since a closed address bounces remittances back to the customers sending them.
- Paper. Where checks are opened, who deposits them, and where the scanned stubs or scanner emails go.
- Portals. Customer supplier portals and payment networks where remittance detail has to be downloaded, with the login moved to a shared account rather than passed around.
- The bank. ACH credits whose detail only shows in the online banking portal, and the deposit records from mobile or remote check deposit.
Point everything you can at one shared address, and give that address to customers as the remittance contact. In QuickBooks, remove or change the departing person's user access, and use the audit log to see what they last posted, so you know where their work stopped.
Keep cash and AR in step while you're short-handed
The priority order is deposit, record, then apply. Get checks to the bank as usual, because holding them until someone can apply them only adds a cash problem to an AR one. Then record each payment against the right customer, even if you can't yet tie it to invoices. A payment recorded with no invoices selected sits on the customer as a credit, which keeps the customer's balance and the bank in agreement until someone has time to apply it properly. Check the Automatically apply credits setting under Account and settings, Advanced, Automation first, because with it on QuickBooks can apply those credits to the oldest open invoices on its own.
Watch the bank feed as well. A deposit waiting under For review in Banking should be matched to the payment you recorded, not added as a new transaction. Adding it books the money as income a second time and leaves the invoice open, and it's an easy slip for someone new to the file.
A payment you can't place at all, with no remittance and a payer name you don't recognize, is better held in a suspense account your accountant agrees than guessed onto a customer. Automatic invoice reminders go out for every open invoice, so consider pausing them under Account and settings, Sales, Reminders until the backlog is applied, so nobody is chased for an invoice they've paid. Our guides to unapplied payments and clearing Undeposited Funds cover the cleanup once the backlog is being worked.
Working through the backlog
Work from the bank, not from the open invoice list. List the deposits since the last payment that was applied properly, oldest first, and pair each one with its remittance. A deposit with a remittance gets applied to exactly the invoices it names. For a deposit with no remittance, email the customer's payables team and ask which invoices it covered, since most can send a copy of the remittance or a payment history from their own system.
Be careful with the help QuickBooks offers along the way. Enter an amount on Receive Payment before ticking anything and QuickBooks selects invoices for you, usually starting with the oldest. That guess is right often enough to seem reliable, and wrong exactly when a customer has paid a newer invoice or held back a disputed one. In a backlog, clear the default selection and tick the invoices the remittance names every time. Payments parked as credits are applied from the same screen: open Receive Payment for the customer, tick the credit and the invoices it paid, and save. A deposit you still can't place goes on a short list with its date, amount and the payer name exactly as the bank shows it, so it's chased rather than forgotten.
Big payers deserve a statement check once the backlog is cleared. Ask your three or four largest customers for their open-items list and compare it with what QuickBooks shows as open for them. Any invoice they say is paid and you show as open is either a payment applied to the wrong invoice or one that never reached you, and both are far easier to fix now than at year end.
Write down what they knew
If there's still a notice period, spend part of it on a payer list rather than on clearing the queue. For each customer that pays in batches, note how they pay, where the remittance comes from, what reference they quote, and anything they routinely deduct. Add the open disputes, the credit memos that were promised and not yet raised, and who signs off a write-off. Keep the notes in QuickBooks itself, in each customer's notes field, so they sit on the screen the next person already uses instead of in a spreadsheet only one person knows about.
If the person has already gone, most of that list can be rebuilt from the last month of remittances. Read a few from each of your biggest payers and the patterns show quickly: the customer that always pays the oldest invoice first, the one that nets off a credit without saying so, the one whose numbers never match yours. That list is the most useful thing a new hire can be handed on day one.
Where RemitClear fits
RemitClear reads each remittance that reaches its forwarding address, whether it's a PDF, a spreadsheet, a scanned check stub or the body of an ACH email. It then matches every line against your open invoices in QuickBooks Online or Intuit Enterprise Suite and creates the Receive Payment with the remittance attached. Because the inbox and the matching sit in the system rather than with one person, a change of staff doesn't stop them.
Once you switch on automatic posting, a payment posts by itself only when every line matches its own invoice number, the total agrees to the cent and every invoice settles exactly. Short payments, unmatched lines and possible duplicates wait in one review queue with the original document beside them, and seats are free, so anyone on the team can work through it. It keeps running while the role is empty, and the new hire starts with a queue of exceptions rather than a month of unapplied cash. See how it works with QuickBooks Online.
