Vendor findings
The Vendor category reads the payee names on the Transaction List and General Ledger. This article covers its most common findings; it is a starting point and will be expanded.
Vendor coded to several accounts
A vendor whose transactions land in three or more different accounts (two, when some of them are bank-feed rows with a blank payee that carry the vendor's name in the memo). The finding lists the accounts and, when one account has only one or two of the vendor's transactions, names it as the likely miscoding.
It does not count:
- Workflow accounts (Accounts Payable, Accounts Receivable, Undeposited Funds) or the bank and credit card accounts the vendor was paid from.
- The same account twice under two spellings. QBO reports name a sub-account by its full path in some places ("Legal & Professional Fees:Lawyer") and by its last part in others ("Lawyer"); both are one account.
It skips:
- Customers. A name whose transactions are all customer-side (invoices, estimates, sales receipts, payments, credit memos, refunds) is not a vendor, and an invoice spreading across several income lines is normal. A name with both customer and vendor transactions is still checked.
- Vendors whose accounts are all expense or cost accounts, up to five of them (a supplier you buy several kinds of things from).
- Payment platforms (PayPal, Square, Stripe and similar), which get a softer note, government agencies paid through liability accounts, trust-account patterns, inventory unit IDs, and the company's own name.
Similar vendor names
Two vendors whose names are close enough to be one vendor entered twice ("Office Depot" and "OfficeDepot"), and the same vendor typed with different capitalization or spacing.
Blank or generic payees
Five or more transactions with no payee, or a generic one like "Deposit" or "Transfer", with any repeating memo patterns that could be used to fill the name in bulk. Within those, blank-payee expenses and payments over $10,000 get their own finding.
When a finding is wrong
Use the flag icon on the finding and say why. Flags go straight to the LedgerClean calibration queue.