QuickBooks 3 Way Match Software for POs and Receipts

QuickBooks does not do an automated 3 way match. QuickBooks Online and Desktop can store purchase orders, record what you received and link a bill to a PO, but neither compares the bill's prices and quantities with the order and the receipt and flags the difference. To get a real 3 way match you add AP software that runs the comparison before the bill is approved, then sends the approved bill back to QuickBooks.

If you are reading this, you probably found out the expensive way: a vendor billed for a full shipment, half of it was on backorder, and QuickBooks happily let you pay the whole thing. The good news is that this is a solved problem. The question is which tool solves it at a price that makes sense for a QuickBooks-sized company.

Does QuickBooks do 3 way matching?

No. QuickBooks Online Plus and Advanced and QuickBooks Desktop let you create purchase orders, and you can pull a PO into a bill so the lines fill in. Intuit's help article on item receipts explains how to record goods when they arrive and link the receipt or PO when you create the bill. What it does not describe is any automatic comparison of the bill with the order or the receipt. ProcureDesk, which sells a QuickBooks add-on, puts it plainly: "QuickBooks does not do automated 3-way matching. It can store purchase orders and link a bill to a PO."

So the match in a QuickBooks-only process is a person with two windows open. That works at 30 bills a month. At 300, the person stops looking at the bills that seem about right, and those are exactly the ones that hide a short shipment or a price that crept up 6 percent.

What a 3 way match in QuickBooks actually needs to check

A useful 3 way match compares three documents: the purchase order (what you agreed to buy), the receipt (what actually arrived) and the vendor's invoice (what you are being asked to pay). The software should answer two questions on every bill. Does the amount agree with the PO, within a tolerance you choose? And is any line billing more units than you received?

Two settings matter more than any feature list. The first is the tolerance. Freight, rounding and small surcharges mean a zero tolerance flags almost everything, and a team that sees 40 flags a day stops reading them. A tolerance of a few percent is a sensible place to start, then tighten it once you see what gets flagged. The second is whether a failed match can stop approval or only warn. You want the choice, because a hard stop on day one will block vendors who never had POs in the first place.

QuickBooks 3 way match software compared

These are the tools that come up when a QuickBooks company goes looking, described from each vendor's own pages as of this month.

Where the others win: Stampli and ProcureDesk both describe live PO syncing with QuickBooks, and ProcureDesk compares unit prices line by line. AutoPayables compares the total against the PO total and checks received quantities by line, so a unit price change that nets out inside your tolerance will not be flagged on its own. If per-unit price policing is the main reason you are buying, weigh that.

Where AutoPayables wins: it is the only one on this list with a price you can read before talking to anyone, and the same bill also runs through duplicate detection and your approval threshold, then goes into a NACHA ACH file or check run for payment. See invoice matching software for the full matching detail and QuickBooks accounts payable automation for how bills get back into your books.

How do I set up 3 way matching for QuickBooks bills?

You set up 3 way matching for QuickBooks by putting the match in front of the bill entry, not after it. The order of work changes, and that is most of the benefit.

1. Keep issuing POs the way you do now. In AutoPayables you can also create them on the purchase orders screen. The PO number on the vendor's invoice is what links the two, and it is normalized, so "PO-1042" and "po 1042" match.
2. Record receipts against the PO lines. Until something is marked received, the match is two-way and is labeled that way. Once quantities are received, the third leg is real data rather than a checkbox.
3. Set your tolerance and choose warn or block. Start with warning only for two or three weeks, look at what gets flagged, then switch on blocking.
4. Send invoices in, not to a person. Forward vendor PDFs to your intake address or upload them. Each bill is read, matched and checked for duplicates before anyone approves it.
5. Export approved bills to QuickBooks Online. Only matched and approved bills reach your ledger, so your QuickBooks AP aging stops containing bills you should not have paid.

What should happen when a QuickBooks bill fails the match?

When a bill fails the match it should stop with the reason attached, for example "billed 40, received 32" or "7.2 percent over PO 4471", so whoever picks it up can call the vendor or the warehouse right away. A list that just says "mismatch" sends someone back into three documents to rediscover the problem. We cover the full exception workflow, including duplicates and approval limits, on our invoice exception management software page.

Not every company needs the whole workflow. If what you really want is the invoice fields pulled off the PDFs so you can compare them in a spreadsheet yourself, a plain invoice data extraction tool is the cheaper answer. Matching software earns its cost when the comparison itself, and the hold on payment, is the part you no longer want to do by hand.

Is QuickBooks Online Advanced enough for 3 way matching?

QuickBooks Online Advanced is not enough for an automated 3 way match. Advanced adds custom fields, workflows and more users, and it handles purchase orders and partial receipts, but it still leaves the price and quantity comparison to you. Moving up a QuickBooks tier will not close this gap; an AP layer in front of QuickBooks will.

Who should buy QuickBooks 3 way match software

The buyers who get the fastest payback are distributors and small manufacturers that receive partial shipments, construction and field service companies buying materials on POs, and multi-location businesses where receiving happens in one place and AP in another. If you process fewer than 50 PO-backed bills a month and one person sees all of them, QuickBooks plus discipline is probably fine. Above that, one caught short shipment a month usually covers the subscription.

You can run the match on your own vendors before deciding. Upload 20 recent bills on the free trial and see which ones would have been held.