this is driving me nuts. On a vendor bill form, the default payables account is coming up different for each user. None of the vendors have a default AP account on the vendor record and I cannot find any other place that would be controlling this. I don't have any workflow running to set the field value either. Any ideas on where the Default Payables account is controlled, besides on the vendor record?

When a vendor record does not have a default payable account set, the account used in the lastest vendor bill created in the system will be used on the vendor bill. I'm not 100% sure, but I think the only way around this would be by setting up the default payables account on all of your vendor records... unless somebody else has a better idea. At the company I work for, we have a default payable account for all of our vendors and we don't run into this issue.

yeah, I read that as well. You can set an accounting preference for the receivables account, but not the payables account

If you have to update all of the vendor default payables accounts, you could probably do so via CSV import

mass update might be simpler

Just took a look and it doesn't look like that field is available for mass update on vendor records

thanks guys! I was planning to do a csv import

Had a similar issue in the past / NS support indicated that this was a 'Sticky field' for users, so would default to whatever account the user last used.