How to Send Remittance Advice for ACH and Wire Payments in QuickBooks Online

The ACH and Wire Remittance Problem in QuickBooks Online

If you run accounts payable for a business that uses QuickBooks Online, you have probably experienced this scenario: you record a bill payment to a vendor, initiate an ACH transfer or wire through your bank, and then... nothing. The money leaves your account. The vendor eventually sees a deposit. But nobody told the vendor what the payment was for.

This is the remittance advice gap in QuickBooks Online, and it is especially painful for ACH and wire payments. Unlike paper checks, which at least arrive with a physical stub the vendor can reference, electronic payments show up as anonymous deposits. Your vendor sees a dollar amount hit their bank account, but without a remittance advice document, they have no idea which invoices you intended to pay, which credits were applied, or how to reconcile the payment against their records.

QuickBooks Online does not include a built-in feature to send remittance advice notifications to vendors when you record a bill payment. This is true regardless of your payment method, but it creates the most friction with ACH and wire transfers because there is no physical artifact accompanying the payment. The result? Vendor confusion, phone calls to your AP team, and delayed reconciliation on both sides.

Why Vendors Need Remittance Details for ACH and Wire Payments

From a vendor's perspective, receiving an ACH or wire payment without remittance details creates real operational problems. Every dollar that arrives needs to be applied against specific invoices in their accounting system. Without remittance advice, the vendor's accounts receivable team is left guessing.

Invoice Matching and Reconciliation

Most vendors issue multiple invoices to the same customer over time. When a payment arrives, it could cover one invoice, several invoices, or partial amounts across multiple invoices. Remittance advice tells the vendor exactly how to apply the funds. Without it, they may apply the payment incorrectly, leading to inaccurate aging reports and cash flow forecasts.

Handling Credits and Adjustments

If you negotiated a discount, received a credit memo for returned goods, or applied a deposit against an outstanding balance, remittance advice communicates all of that. A vendor who receives $4,250 via ACH when they expected $4,500 needs to know that the $250 difference was a pre-agreed early payment discount, not a short payment that requires follow-up.

Audit Trail and Compliance

Both you and your vendor benefit from having a clear paper trail. Remittance advice provides documentation that supports audit inquiries, tax preparation, and dispute resolution. When payments are made electronically with no accompanying documentation, both parties are working from incomplete records.

Reducing AP and AR Friction

Every payment that arrives without context generates work. The vendor's AR team has to contact your AP team to ask what the payment covers. Your AP team then has to look up the payment, identify the invoices, and relay the information. This back-and-forth is entirely avoidable if remittance advice is sent at the time of payment.

The Check vs. ACH/Wire Gap in QuickBooks Online

To understand why ACH and wire payments are uniquely problematic, it helps to compare how different payment methods handle remittance information in QuickBooks Online.

When you print a check from QuickBooks Online, the check stub includes a list of the invoices being paid. This is far from perfect — it can be hard to read, it truncates long invoice numbers, and it only works if you physically mail the check — but at least the vendor gets something they can use for reconciliation.

ACH and wire transfers, by contrast, arrive at the vendor's bank with essentially no context. The bank transaction may include a short reference field, but it will not list your invoice numbers, credit amounts, or payment breakdown. Your vendor is completely in the dark.

This creates an ironic situation: businesses adopt ACH and wire transfers because they are faster, cheaper, and more reliable than paper checks. But by moving away from checks, they inadvertently eliminate the only remittance communication channel that QuickBooks Online provides. Faster payment, worse communication.

What Happens When You Don't Send Remittance Advice

The consequences of skipping remittance advice for ACH and wire payments are predictable and consistent. If you manage AP for a business that pays vendors electronically, you have likely experienced some or all of these:

• Vendor phone calls and emails. "We received a deposit of $12,340. Can you tell us which invoices this covers?" This question consumes time on both sides and usually arrives at the worst possible moment.
• Delayed vendor reconciliation. Until the vendor knows how to apply your payment, their books remain unreconciled. This affects their aging reports, cash flow projections, and financial statements.
• Misapplied payments. When a vendor guesses which invoices a payment covers, they sometimes guess wrong. This leads to future discrepancies, incorrect balance statements, and additional rounds of communication to sort things out.
• Strained vendor relationships. Vendors who consistently receive payments without remittance details start to view your business as operationally disorganized. This matters when you need favorable terms, priority fulfillment, or flexibility during cash flow crunches.
• Duplicate payment risk. If a vendor cannot confirm that a specific invoice was paid, they may continue to send collection notices. Your team may then mistakenly pay the invoice again, creating an overpayment that requires its own reconciliation effort to resolve.

Manual Workarounds in QuickBooks Online

QuickBooks Online does not have a "send remittance advice" button. But businesses still need to communicate payment details to vendors, so many resort to manual workarounds. Here are the most common approaches:

1. Bills and Applied Payments Report

QuickBooks Online has a built-in report called "Bills and Applied Payments" (sometimes called "Unpaid Bills Detail" depending on your workflow). You can filter this report by vendor and date to see which bills were paid and when. The workaround is to run this report, export it to PDF or Excel, and manually email it to the vendor.

The problem: this report was not designed to be a remittance advice document. It includes internal data the vendor does not need, may not format cleanly for external distribution, and requires you to manually run, export, and email it for each vendor, for each payment run. For a single payment, this takes 5-10 minutes. For a weekly payment run covering 20 vendors, that is one to three hours of manual work.

2. Copying Payment Details into an Email

Some AP teams open the bill payment record in QuickBooks Online, manually copy the invoice numbers and amounts, and paste them into an email to the vendor. This is straightforward for a payment covering one or two invoices, but becomes tedious and error-prone when a single payment covers many invoices or includes adjustments.

3. Building a Spreadsheet Template

More organized teams create an Excel or Google Sheets template that mirrors a remittance advice document. After each payment run, they populate the template with data from QuickBooks, save it as a PDF, and email it to each vendor. This produces a professional-looking document but adds yet another step — and another place where data can be typed incorrectly.

4. Printing Check Stubs Without Sending Checks

A creative workaround: some businesses record the payment in QBO as if they are printing a check (to generate the check stub with invoice details), print the stub, and then email or fax it to the vendor while actually paying via ACH. This works but is confusing, clunky, and misrepresents the payment method on the document.

Why Workarounds Don't Scale

All of the manual approaches described above share the same fundamental problems:

• They are manual and repetitive. Every payment run requires the same data extraction, formatting, and sending steps. Nothing is automated.
• They are error-prone. Manually copying invoice numbers, amounts, and vendor email addresses introduces opportunities for mistakes at every step.
• They do not scale. What takes 10 minutes for 1 vendor takes 3 hours for 20 vendors. As your business grows and you add vendors, the manual workload grows linearly.
• They are inconsistent. Different AP staff may use different templates, formatting, or email language, creating an inconsistent vendor experience.
• They lack tracking. Did the vendor receive the remittance? Did they open it? There is no way to know with manual emails and PDF attachments.

If you are paying more than a handful of vendors via ACH or wire each month, manual remittance advice quickly becomes one of the most time-consuming parts of your accounts payable process. The irony is that all the data already exists in QuickBooks Online — it just needs to be extracted and delivered to the vendor automatically.

The Solution: Remittance Advice App for QuickBooks Online

The Remittance Advice app was built to solve exactly this problem. It connects directly to your QuickBooks Online account, reads your bill payment data, and lets you send professional remittance advice documents to your vendors by email — in seconds, not hours.

It works for every payment method, but it is particularly valuable for ACH and wire transfers, where there is no other mechanism to communicate payment details to vendors. Instead of manually compiling invoice lists and emailing PDFs, you select the payments you want to notify vendors about and click send.

How It Works

Getting started with the Remittance Advice app takes less than 5 minutes. There are three steps:

That is it. No exporting reports, no copying data into spreadsheets, no formatting PDFs. The app reads the data directly from QuickBooks Online, so the remittance advice is always accurate and up to date.

Features That Matter for ACH and Wire Payments

The Remittance Advice app includes several features that are specifically useful when you pay vendors by ACH or wire transfer:

• Automatic invoice detail extraction. The app pulls the full list of invoices covered by each bill payment directly from QBO. No manual data entry required.
• Email, PDF, and Excel delivery. Send remittance advice by email, or download as PDF or Excel for your records. Attach the documents to your own emails if you prefer.
• Batch sending. Finished a payment run covering 15 vendors? Select all 15 payments and send remittance advice in one click, instead of composing 15 individual emails.
• Credit and adjustment visibility. Credits, discounts, and partial payments are all clearly itemized on the remittance advice, so vendors can see exactly how the payment amount was calculated.
• Vendor email management. The app uses the email addresses stored in QuickBooks Online, with the option to add CC recipients or override the primary address for specific vendors.
• Payment method agnostic. Whether you record the payment as ACH, wire, check, or any other method in QBO, the Remittance Advice app handles it the same way. It works with your existing workflow, not against it.

Pricing and Getting Started

The Remittance Advice app is designed to be affordable for businesses of all sizes:

Consider the math: if your AP team spends even 3 hours per month manually creating and emailing remittance advice for ACH and wire payments, that labor cost far exceeds $14.99. For most businesses, the app pays for itself within the first week of use.

Conclusion

ACH and wire transfers are faster, cheaper, and more reliable than paper checks. But when you pay vendors electronically through QuickBooks Online, there is no built-in mechanism to tell vendors what they are being paid for. This remittance advice gap leads to vendor confusion, wasted AP and AR staff time, misapplied payments, and strained business relationships.

Manual workarounds — running reports, copying invoice details into emails, building spreadsheet templates — technically solve the problem, but they do not scale. They consume hours every month and introduce errors at every step.

The Remittance Advice app for QuickBooks Online eliminates this manual work entirely. It reads your payment data directly from QBO, generates professional remittance advice documents, and emails them to your vendors in seconds. It works for ACH, wire, check, and every other payment method — and it costs $14.99 per month after a free 1-month trial with no credit card required.

If you are paying vendors via ACH or wire and not sending remittance advice, you are creating unnecessary work for yourself and your vendors. Sign up for a free trial and see how much time you can save.