Free duplicate bill checker

Each bill is reported as a suspected duplicate at most once, so the possible duplicate value never counts a bill twice. The earlier bill in a pair is shown as the original. When a vendor credit for the same amount is in the file, the pair drops one confidence level and says so, because someone may already have corrected it.

Why these three: QuickBooks Online’s duplicate warning compares bill numbers on the same vendor and nothing else, so it misses a number typed with an extra prefix, a bill entered without a number, and a bill on a second vendor record. Our guide to duplicate bills in QuickBooks Online covers the warning and its blind spots.

• QuickBooks Online. Open Reports, find a report that lists bills by vendor (Transaction List by Vendor or Unpaid Bills), set the dates, and export it. Intuit’s help article describes the Export to Excel option; open the Excel file and save it as CSV. The checker skips the report title, the subtotal rows and the payments, and reads the vendor from the heading above each group.
• Xero. Export the bills for the period to CSV. If the export has one row for each line of a bill, with the bill total repeated, the checker folds those rows into one bill.
• Anything else. A CSV with a header row is enough. If the column names are unusual, the checker asks you to pick the vendor, number, date and amount columns yourself.

Export a period long enough to catch a resend. A bill entered in March and again in May will only pair up if both months are in the same file. Three to six months per client is a sensible start.

• Title rows and footers. It finds the row of column names under a report title and ignores the timestamp line at the bottom.
• Subtotals and totals. Rows such as “Total for” a vendor are skipped, so a subtotal is never mistaken for a bill.
• Amounts. Currency symbols, thousands separators, quoted values, decimal commas and negatives in brackets are all read as numbers.
• Payments and purchase orders. When the file has a transaction type column, bill payments, purchase orders, journal entries and transfers are left out.
• Credits and negative rows. Vendor credits are never flagged. They are used to spot a duplicate that has already been reversed.
• Voided bills. Rows with a voided or deleted status are left out.
• US and UK dates. Month-first and day-first files are both read. If a file could be either, you are asked.

1. Open both bills and compare the attached invoices. The same PDF twice is a duplicate. Two different invoices for the same amount are not.
2. Check whether either was paid. The export does not say. Look at the bill payments on each.
3. If neither or only one was paid, delete or void the extra bill so it cannot be picked up in the next payment run.
4. If both were paid, ask the vendor for a refund or a credit and record it. See how to enter a vendor credit in QuickBooks Online and the recovery steps in preventing duplicate invoice payments.
5. If the pair is on two vendor records, merge the records so the next bill lands on one vendor.
6. Find the second way in. Most duplicates arrive twice: once by email and once through a portal, a forward or the post. One intake address removes the cause.