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Fixing Negative Vendor Balances

Learn how to properly track and manage your vendor balances using InventoryIQ

Rayla Rappaport avatar
Written by Rayla Rappaport
Updated over 4 months ago

1. About

InventoryIQ automatically tracks your vendor balances based on your POs, payments from your banks or credit cards, and from any bills added to Finaloop.

Sometimes, you may see a negative vendor balance (shown in red) on your inventory vendors page, indicating that we need some input from you. This article will walk you through how to easily identify and fix any missing data.


2. Managing your negative vendors

If you see a mission asking you to review your negative vendors, here’s how to track down and fix the issue.

Step 1: Review Purchase Orders and Transfers

  1. Go to Inventory > Purchases > Vendors to check any negative balances.

  2. Set the inventory vendors have negative balance toggle to ON. This filters the vendors to show only those with negative rolling balances.

  3. Click a vendor to view the details of their balance changes.

Double-check that all POs and transfers for this vendor are added and accurate.

Tip: If the issue relates to indirect costs and a PO or transfer is missing under the vendor, make sure the vendor name is correctly added under indirect costs. For example, edit the “Duties and tax” to assign it to the correct vendor.


Step 2: Review payments

  1. When reviewing negative vendors, review the payments and ensure all payments you see relate to POs or transfers created.

  2. If a payment doesn’t relate to a PO or transfer (e.g., a small expense like packing paper), you can categorize it as “incidentals.”

    1. To categorize as incidentals:

      1. Click the payment link to go to the Bills & Payments page.

      2. Select the payment and go to Actions > Change type

      3. Choose Incidentals from the dropdown and click Save.

Note: Recording inventory as incidentals assign them directly to your P&L (as Product COGS, under the COGS section).

With some exceptions, under US tax laws, inventory-related costs should be categorized as inventory and expensed only when sold. We recommend that you consult with your tax advisor, CPA, or accountant to make sure you're compliant with the relevant laws.


Step 3: Add historical POs and historical payments

When setting up InventoryIQ, make sure to add any POs or transfers from before you started using InventoryIQ if the items were received after your start date. Also, add any payments tied to these historical POs.

> To add a historical payment:

  • Go to Inventory > Purchases > Bills & Payments.

  • Click Actions > Add a historical payment.

  • Enter the payment date, amount, vendor, and category.

  • Click Save.


If none of these steps fix the issue, feel free to contact our support team at [email protected] for more help. We’ll dive deeper and sort it out!

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