Vendor is also a Customer?

by Andy Nelms
(Dacula, Georgia)

This is similar to yesterday's question regarding a name in two lists in QuickBooks.

I am a realtor with an LLC. My real estate broker is a local Keller Williams Realty office. I pay office dues to them monthly and they pay me a commission when I make a sale. I am an independent contractor working with them as an affiliate.

As you can see at times I treat them as a vendor so I can make payments for my office dues but I also need to record the checks they give me for my commission.

Since it is not cool accounting wise to have the same entity as both vendor and customer how do I handle the recording of income from them as vendor/customer and the paying of office dues monthly.

Thanks in advance for your help.

Andy

Jennifer replies:

Hi again Andy,

This is a good question. Although, technically, the realty office is a single entity, from an accounting standpoint we must treat the vendor transactions separately from the customer transactions.

Therefore, the names must be entered differently in their respective registers. In fact, as you may already know, QuickBooks does not allow the same exact name in more than one list.

Enter this name by making a small alteration in the name in each list. For example, in your customer list, call it "Keller Williams Realty - C", and in your vendor list call it "Keller Williams Realty - V". C is for customer and V is for vendor.

When creating invoices for this entity as your customer, use the name as it appears in the customer list. Similarly, when creating vendor bills or other payments when this entity is acting as your vendor, use the name as it appears in your vendor list.

This allows you to keep everything separate, as it should be. The only difficulty may be if/when they want to pay their customer invoice from you with a vendor bill from them. Because of the way QB was designed, the entries in this case are not straightforward or intuitive.

If you would post a comment letting me know if this was helpful, I'd appreciate it. Thanks for asking.