How to Send a Remittance Advice in QuickBooks Online (and Read One You Receive)

QuickBooks Online can send a remittance advice. It just doesn't put the option where you'd look for it, and which route you take depends on whether you pay through QuickBooks Bill Pay. All the document does is tell a supplier which of their invoices your payment settled, so producing one should be trivial, and on the paying side it nearly is. The harder half is the reverse: what to do when a customer pays you and lands a remittance in your accounts receivable inbox.

Came here to prove you paid a vendor? The sections just below do exactly that, and it's a short job once you know where QuickBooks keeps the option. The part that genuinely costs a finance team time is the mirror image, a customer's remittance landing in your own inbox at volume.

Does QuickBooks Online send a remittance advice?

Yes, in two ways, depending on how you pay.

• Through QuickBooks Bill Pay. If you pay a vendor with QuickBooks Bill Pay, a remittance advice PDF is attached to the payment email the vendor receives automatically. You don't have to turn it on.
• By hand on QuickBooks Online without Bill Pay. You can still send a remittance from the bill payment itself, using the Send remittance action. One rule is worth knowing up front: you can only send remittance for a bill payment transaction, and it goes to the email on file from when that payment was created.

Either way, the remittance lists the vendor, the payment date, the amount, and the bills the payment settles, which is all most suppliers want: a clean line from your payment to the right invoices, with no guessing.

First, record the bill payment

Sending a remittance starts from a recorded bill payment, so that has to exist first. There are two ways to create one.

Pay a single bill

1. Open the bill. Go to Expenses or Vendors, under Expenses and bills, and open the bill you are paying.
2. Select Make payment. Use the Make payment button on the bill. Choose the bank or credit account, set the payment date, and confirm the amount.
3. Apply it and save. In Outstanding Transactions, make sure the bill is selected, then choose Save and close.

Pay several bills at once

1. Open Pay bills. Select + New, then Pay bills.
2. Choose the account and date. Pick the payment account and the payment date.
3. Select the bills and save. Check every bill you are paying, confirm the amounts, and select Save. QuickBooks Online records a separate bill payment for each vendor in the run.

Recording a bill payment marks the bill as paid in your books. Note that unless you're paying through QuickBooks Bill Pay, this records the payment, it doesn't move the money: the cash still leaves your bank by check, ACH, or transfer the usual way.

Send the remittance advice on QuickBooks Online without Bill Pay

Once the bill payment exists, send the advice from the vendor.

1. Open the vendor. Go to Vendors, under Expenses and bills, and select the vendor you paid.
2. Select the bill payment. In their transaction list, check the box next to the bill payment you want to send.
3. Select Send remittance. QuickBooks Online emails the advice to the address held on the vendor when the payment was created.

That last detail trips people up. If the vendor's email has changed, updating the contact record doesn't redirect a remittance for a payment that already exists. To send to a different address you have to delete and recreate the bill payment with the right email, so it's worth checking the contact before you pay rather than after.

If you pay through QuickBooks Bill Pay

When the payment goes out through QuickBooks Bill Pay, the remittance is automatic. A PDF is attached to the payment notification the vendor receives, on by default, for every Bill Pay payment, so you never open the Send remittance action at all. If a vendor says they didn't get one, the usual causes are a missing or wrong email on the vendor record, so check the vendor's contact details first.

Printing a remittance or payment stub

Sometimes you need a copy on paper or as a PDF rather than an email, for the file or for a vendor who only accepts their own format. QuickBooks Online has a report for exactly this.

1. Open the report. Go to Reports and search for "bill", then open Bills and Applied Payments (Bill Stub, Vendor Check Stub).
2. Set the period. Change the report period to the payment date.
3. Filter to one vendor. Use Customize, then Filter, to narrow to a single vendor, then run it and print or save it as a PDF.

If you print checks, the check voucher does the same job: it lists the bills the check pays on the stub. One limit to know is length. A printed voucher stub shows around thirteen bills and then summarizes the rest, so a payment covering dozens of invoices won't fit line by line on a single stub. The Bills and Applied Payments report, or Transaction List by Vendor, is the cleaner option when one payment covers a long list.

What about a remittance advice template in QuickBooks Online?

People search for a "QuickBooks Online remittance template" expecting an editable document like the invoice form. It's more constrained than that.

Custom form styles, under the gear icon, only covers sales forms: invoices, estimates, and sales receipts. Bill payments, remittances, and the voucher stub aren't in that list, so you can't redesign their layout. They print with your company name and the fixed fields QuickBooks holds: payment date, amount, and the bills covered with their references. For most suppliers that's the right trade: a remittance has to be unmistakable, and it doesn't have to be pretty. If you genuinely need a branded, per-vendor remittance, that's a job for a third-party app from the QuickBooks App Store rather than a built-in setting.

The other side of the desk: when a customer sends you a remittance

That covers the sending side end to end. Now the desk turns around: this time you got paid. A customer has settled up and sent a remittance to show which of your invoices the money covers. Producing it was trivial on their end. On yours it's cash application, and in QuickBooks Online that job lives nowhere near the vendor screens.

The screen for it is Receive Payment: pick the customer, key the total into Amount received, and tick each open invoice the remittance names in Outstanding Transactions, adjusting the Payment column on any line that was short-paid or netted for a deduction. There's no native step for coding that deduction inside Receive Payment, so whatever the customer withheld has to be booked separately, into the account your own policy says it belongs in. Against one or two invoices it's a minute of work. Scale and page-count are where it turns.

Picture a wholesale distributor supplying a national grocery chain. Every two weeks the grocer pays and attaches a multi-page remittance covering the best part of two hundred invoices, a few short-paid for damaged stock, one netted against a promotional rebate. That single deposit has to be split across every one of them inside Receive Payment, each deduction accounted for. The two-minute sending job is now most of an afternoon, and it comes round again fourteen days later.

It also carries a quieter cost. A customer payment that's taken in but never allocated to specific invoices sits in unapplied cash, which QuickBooks Online books as Unapplied Cash Payment Income on a cash-basis P&L. Until someone goes back and applies it, your receivables aging is wrong, your income reads high, and your collections team may go chasing money you have already banked. Clearing unapplied cash is that same matching work, just done later with less context, and the aging report stays wrong, overstating what customers owe, until you get to it.

Automation is built for exactly this half. RemitClear reads the incoming remittance line by line, lines each one up against your open QuickBooks Online invoices, sorts the short-payments and offsets, and hands you the allocations to approve before anything posts. A multi-page grocer remittance becomes a two-minute check instead of a lost afternoon. That's what RemitClear's cash application for QuickBooks Online does. To be clear, this is only the receiving side. Paying your own vendors is unchanged: the bill payment and Send remittance screens above cover it completely. For a ledger-neutral take, see our overview of cash application automation software.

Summary

QuickBooks Online treats sending and receiving a remittance as two entirely different jobs, and only the first one is easy. Sending is a buried button you can learn in a minute. Receiving is cash application, and a single grocer remittance running to several hundred lines will swallow an afternoon of Receive Payment every two weeks. Learn the sending steps once; automate the receiving before it starts costing you those afternoons.