Glossary · Bookkeeping & QuickBooks term
Accounts payable
The money your business owes vendors and suppliers for bills received but not yet paid — a liability on your balance sheet until you settle it.
In plain terms
What accounts payable means.
Accounts payable (AP) is the total your business owes its vendors and suppliers for goods or services received and invoiced but not yet paid. It is recorded as a current liability on the balance sheet.
On accrual-basis books, an expense and the payable are recorded when you receive the bill (incur the cost); the payable clears when you pay it. AP is tracked per vendor and per bill, and aged the same way receivables are.
Managing AP protects cash and relationships.
Accounts payable is a lever on cash flow: paying too early drains cash you may need; paying too late risks late fees, lost early-payment discounts, and strained vendor relationships. A clean AP aging report lets you time payments deliberately instead of reacting.
It is also a common source of book errors — bills entered twice, payments not matched to bills, or expenses recorded on payment instead of on receipt — all of which distort both the expense reports and the liability balance until corrected in a cleanup.
Put it to work
Vendor balances that don’t look right?
A Certified ProAdvisor finds duplicate bills, unmatched payments, and timing errors in your AP — scoped in writing, fixed-fee.