How to Email Remittance Advice in QuickBooks Online (2026 Guide)

If you have ever paid a vendor and then thought, "I should let them know which invoices this payment covers," you have run into one of the most persistent gaps in QuickBooks Online. After years of community requests, QuickBooks Online (QBO) now has a basic way to send remittance advice, but it is manual, works one bill payment at a time, and only covers bill payments.

Remittance advice is a simple document. It tells a vendor, "We sent you a payment for $X, and here are the invoices it covers." It is standard practice in accounts payable departments everywhere. It helps vendors apply payments to the correct invoices, reduces back-and-forth emails asking "what was that payment for?", and keeps your vendor relationships running smoothly.

For a business that pays more than a few vendors, that is not enough. In this guide, we will walk through what QuickBooks Online offers on its own, the manual workarounds people still rely on, why they fall short for most businesses, and a purpose-built solution that fills the gap completely.

What QuickBooks Online's Built-In Remittance Advice Does (and Doesn't Do)

For years this was one of the most frequently asked questions in the QuickBooks Community forums. QuickBooks Online in the UK, Australia, and Canada has long had a "Send remittance" option, and Intuit's help article now describes the same option for the US: pick a vendor, tick a bill payment, choose Send remittance, and QuickBooks emails it.

That covers an occasional payment. For regular accounts payable work, the limits show up quickly:

• Manual, every time. Nothing is sent automatically or on a schedule. Someone has to remember to send it after each payment.
• Bill payments only. Payments recorded as checks or expenses, which is how many ACH and wire payments end up in QuickBooks, are not covered.
• A fixed recipient. It goes to the vendor email on file when the payment was created. Intuit's own fix for a wrong address is to delete and re-create the payment.
• No control over the document. You can't choose the columns, add your own branding, or CC someone in your AP team.
• No easy way to send many at once, and no history of what was sent to whom.

Vendors need to know which invoices a payment covers, especially when a single payment is applied to multiple bills. Without that detail, the vendor's accounts receivable team cannot properly apply the payment, leading to confusion, follow-up calls, and statements that incorrectly show amounts as outstanding.

Because of those limits, and because the built-in option was missing for so long, QBO users developed two common manual workarounds. Neither is ideal, but let us walk through both so you understand your options before we discuss a better approach.

Manual Workaround #1: The Bills and Applied Payments Report

The most commonly recommended workaround inside QuickBooks Online involves using the built-in Bills and Applied Payments report. This is the approach that Intuit's own support articles typically suggest. Here is how it works step by step:

1. Navigate to Reports. In your QuickBooks Online dashboard, go to the Reports section. You can search for "Bills and Applied Payments" in the search bar, or find it under the Expenses and Vendors report category.
2. Filter by vendor. Once the report loads, it will show data for all vendors by default. You need to filter it down to the specific vendor you want to send remittance to. Use the Vendor Name filter dropdown and select the individual vendor.
3. Set the date range. Adjust the report date range to cover the period of the payment you want to document. If you paid a vendor last week, you might set the range to the current month or use a custom date range that includes the specific payment date. Getting this wrong means the payment might not appear in the report.
4. Export to Excel or PDF. Once the report displays the bills and their associated payments, click the export button in the upper right. You can export to Excel or print it as a PDF.
5. Email it manually. Open your email client (Outlook, Gmail, etc.), compose a new email to the vendor, attach the exported file, write a brief note explaining what the attachment is, and send it.

That is five distinct steps just to notify one vendor about one payment. And the end result is a generic QuickBooks accounting report that was never designed to be a vendor-facing remittance advice document. It includes extra columns, subtotals, and formatting that your vendor does not need to see, and it lacks the clear, professional structure of a proper remittance advice.

Manual Workaround #2: Excel Export from Bill Payments

A second workaround involves pulling your bill payment data out of QuickBooks and building the remittance advice document yourself. This gives you more control over the final output but requires significantly more effort. Here is what this process looks like in practice:

1. Go to Expenses. Navigate to the Expenses section in QuickBooks Online and find your bill payments list.
2. Find the bill payment. Locate the specific bill payment transaction you need. You can search by vendor name, date, or payment amount. If you processed a batch of payments, you will need to find each one individually.
3. Note the details. Open the bill payment and write down or copy the key details: vendor name, payment date, payment amount, payment method (check number, ACH reference, etc.), and the complete list of bills that were included in the payment along with their individual amounts.
4. Create a spreadsheet or document. Open Excel, Google Sheets, or a word processor. Manually create a remittance advice document with your company name and address, the vendor's name and address, and all the payment details you just collected from QuickBooks.
5. Format it professionally. Add your company logo, format the columns to be readable, add headers, make sure the numbers line up, and generally make it look professional enough to send to an external party. This is your company's name on the document, after all.
6. Export and email. Save the finished document as a PDF, open your email client, and email it to the vendor with an appropriate subject line and message.

This is even more labor-intensive than the first workaround. You are essentially building a remittance advice document from scratch every single time you want to send one. For a business that pays a handful of vendors per month, it might be tolerable. For a business that pays dozens or hundreds of vendors, this is simply not sustainable.

Why These Options Fall Short

QuickBooks' built-in option and both of the workarounds described above technically accomplish the goal of notifying a vendor about a payment. But they have significant drawbacks that make them impractical for regular, ongoing use in any real accounts payable operation:

• Too many manual steps. Even the simpler report-based workaround requires five distinct actions across multiple applications (QuickBooks, your file system, your email client). When you are processing vendor payments every week, those steps add up to hours of wasted time each month. Time your AP team could spend on higher-value work.
• No real batch capability. If you just ran a payment batch covering 15 different vendors, you need to repeat the process 15 separate times, whether you use a workaround or QuickBooks' own Send remittance. This is the single biggest limitation.
• Unprofessional output. The Bills and Applied Payments report was designed as an internal accounting report for bookkeepers and controllers, not as vendor-facing correspondence. It includes column headers, accounting-specific subtotals, and formatting that look out of place in a business communication. Your vendors deserve a clean, clear document that gets straight to the point.
• No email tracking or audit trail. When you send a manually created attachment via your personal or shared email account, you have no centralized record inside QuickBooks of what was sent, when it was sent, or to whom. If a vendor calls three months later asking "did you send remittance for the August payment?", you have to search through your email archives and hope you can find it.
• Error-prone process. Manual data entry and copy-pasting between QuickBooks and Excel introduces real opportunities for mistakes. Transposing an invoice number, entering the wrong payment amount, or sending remittance to the wrong email address defeats the entire purpose of remittance advice. These errors can cause more confusion than sending nothing at all.
• Does not scale. A business paying 5 vendors a month might tolerate the manual process, though even that gets tedious. A business paying 50, 100, or 200 vendors per month absolutely cannot sustain it. The workarounds do not scale with your accounts payable volume, which means growing businesses eventually just stop sending remittance advice altogether.

A Better Solution: The Remittance Advice App for QuickBooks Online

The Remittance Advice app was built specifically to fill the gap that QuickBooks Online leaves open. It connects directly to your QBO account through Intuit's official API, pulls in your bill payment data automatically, and lets you email professional remittance advice to your vendors in seconds rather than minutes.

This is not a generic PDF tool or a spreadsheet template you have to fill in manually. It is a QuickBooks-certified application that has been listed on the Intuit App Store since 2018, purpose-built for exactly this workflow. It reads your bill payments directly from QuickBooks Online, formats them into clean and professional remittance advice documents, and handles the emailing for you.

How It Works: 3 Simple Steps

Instead of the multi-step workarounds described above, sending remittance advice with the app takes just three steps:

That is it. What used to take 10 minutes or more per vendor now takes about 30 seconds. And if you are sending remittance for a batch of payments to multiple vendors, you can select all of them and send in bulk — something that is completely impossible with the manual workarounds discussed earlier.

Key Features

Beyond the core workflow of selecting bill payments and clicking send, the Remittance Advice app includes several features designed for real-world accounts payable operations:

Pricing and Free Trial

The Remittance Advice app is priced at $24.99 per month, or $249 a year (2 months free). That is a flat rate with no per-user fees, no per-email charges, and no transaction limits. Whether you send 5 remittance advice emails per month or 500, the price stays the same.

For perspective, consider the cost of the manual alternative: if your AP clerk spends just 10 minutes per vendor on the manual workaround and you pay 20 vendors per month, that is over 3 hours of labor dedicated to a task that should take minutes. At any reasonable hourly rate, $24.99 per month pays for itself many times over with the very first payment run.

You can also find the app on the official Intuit QuickBooks App Store listing, where it has been certified and available since 2018.

Who Is This For?

The Remittance Advice app is designed for any business that uses QuickBooks Online in the United States (Simple Start, Essentials, Plus, or Advanced) and wants to notify vendors when payments are sent. The most common users include:

• Small business owners who handle their own accounts payable and want to maintain professional vendor relationships without spending hours on manual paperwork and copy-pasting.
• Bookkeepers and accountants who manage AP for several clients. One login can manage all your clients' QuickBooks Online companies, and you switch between them from the company menu. Each client company keeps its own settings, Email History and auto-scheduling. Businesses with several entities can use it the same way. Remittance Advice for bookkeepers
• AP clerks and controllers at mid-size companies who process large payment batches weekly or bi-weekly and need an efficient, reliable way to notify all vendors after each payment run.
• Construction companies, property management firms, and professional services businesses that pay numerous subcontractors, suppliers, and service providers and need clear, documented payment communication for every transaction.

Conclusion

QuickBooks Online is an excellent accounting platform for US businesses, but its built-in remittance advice is manual and limited, a real and well-documented gap that affects thousands of companies every day. The manual workarounds — using the Bills and Applied Payments report or building Excel remittance documents by hand — are functional in a pinch but slow, tedious, and completely impractical at any meaningful volume.

The Remittance Advice app exists specifically to solve this problem. It connects securely to your QuickBooks Online account, pulls in your bill payments in real time, and lets you email professional remittance advice to any number of vendors in seconds. At $24.99 per month with a free 14-day trial that requires no credit card, there is very little risk in giving it a try.

If you have been copying and pasting payment details into spreadsheets, emailing generic QBO reports to your vendors, or simply not sending remittance advice at all because the process was too painful, now is a good time to try a better approach. Your vendors will appreciate the clear, professional communication, and your AP team will appreciate getting those hours back every month.