Run Accounts Payable on Top of QuickBooks Online

Approval workflow, a vendor portal, ACH payments, and automatic bill payment sync. QuickBooks stays your system of record, and the manual work in front of it goes away.

Book a DemoSee how the sync works

Two-way sync with QuickBooks Online. Vendors maintain their own details.

Cleo Pay accounting settings with QuickBooks connected, showing auto-create vendors and bill payments enabled, invoice sync status, and counts of synced vendors, bank accounts, and categories

The problem

QuickBooks records payables. It does not run them.

That distinction is easy to miss until volume grows. An accounting file is very good at holding what you owe and what you paid. It was not built to chase an invoice out of somebody's inbox, hold a payment until the right person signs off, move money, and prove afterward that the two halves match. Most teams fill that gap with people, and the cost shows up as duplicate payments, a close that takes a week, and nobody able to answer whether a vendor was paid.

What Cleo Pay addsWhat it means in practice

A queue instead of an inbox

Vendors submit invoices to a portal they maintain themselves. There is one place to look, and the person who owes you an invoice is the person responsible for sending it.

An approval trail that exists

Every bill routes for approval before payment, with a record of who approved what and when. This is the control most QuickBooks-only setups are missing, and the reason duplicate invoices get caught.

Payment and coding in one action

The payment carries its expense account with it, so you are not paying in one system and categorizing in another. Standard ACH is free, Fast ACH is there when a vendor cannot wait.

Close that starts already reconciled

Each payment posts back to QuickBooks Online as a bill payment linked to the original bill. Reconciliation stops being a month-end project.

Vendors who maintain themselves

Tax details, bank accounts, and contact information are owned by the vendor. When their account number changes, they change it, and you find out because the record updated rather than because a payment failed.

Multi-location without multi-entry

Switch between businesses under one login, with each mapped to its own QuickBooks class or location code. Shared vendors are onboarded once.

Your books do not move

QuickBooks Online stays the system of record and your accountant keeps working where they always have. What changes is that the work in front of the books stops being manual.

Questions

Accounts payable with QuickBooks

Can QuickBooks Online handle accounts payable on its own?
It can record what you owe, and for a low volume of bills that is often enough. The strain shows up as volume grows: no approval trail, no vendor self-service, and payment happening in a separate system that someone has to reconcile back by hand. Cleo Pay adds that missing layer and keeps QuickBooks as the system of record.
How many bills does this make sense for?
The break-even is less about a bill count and more about whether more than one person touches the process. Once approval, payment, and bookkeeping sit with different people, the manual handoffs are where errors and duplicate payments enter.
Does it work across multiple locations or entities?
Yes. You can switch between businesses under one login, and each one maps to its own QuickBooks class or location code during setup so the P&L stays segmented by property. Vendors shared across locations do not have to be onboarded twice.
What does this do for month-end close?
Every payment is already linked to its bill and coded to the account you mapped, so the match is done before close starts. The work that usually happens at month-end moves to the moment of payment, where the context is still fresh.
Who can approve payments?
Approval is a required step in the workflow with a record of who approved what and when. That record is what auditors ask for and what makes duplicate or inflated invoices catchable rather than discoverable months later.
How does vendor onboarding work?
You invite vendors by email, shareable link, or QR code, and they complete their own profile, tax details, and bank connection. Because they maintain their own information, you are not the one chasing a W-9 or retyping a changed account number.
Will this change our chart of accounts?
No. Cleo Pay pulls your existing chart of accounts and categories from QuickBooks Online and keeps them mapped, so coding stays consistent with the books you already keep.
What about 1099s for contractors we pay through AP?
The W-9 is collected during onboarding, before the first payment, and Cleo Pay keeps a running total for each contractor against the current 1099-NEC reporting threshold. Year end becomes an export rather than a reconstruction.

See your payables running on QuickBooks

We will connect a sandbox to QuickBooks Online and walk a bill from vendor submission through approval, payment, and reconciliation.

Book a DemoAll QuickBooks features