A bill payment captures and pays a cost that never went through a purchase order: the utilities, rent and ad-hoc invoices that simply arrive. It is a one-stop document, record the bill, code it to the right expense accounts, and pay it, without the full procurement chain.
- When to use a bill versus a purchase invoice
- How a single bill can split across expense accounts
- How it posts, and what Ledger Change is for
- The bill lifecycle including the e-invoice stage
Anatomy of the screen
- Bill header – the vendor, their bill code, a description, your internal code and date, an optional project, currency, and an e-invoice control where MyInvois applies.
- Line items – each line is a cost, with the expense ledger it codes to, quantity, price and tax. One bill can therefore split across several expense accounts.
- Payment account – where it is paid from: a company account, a director's account, or a contra against receivables.
- Transaction fees – as on payments.
- Payment status – Pending or Cleared, with a clearance date and who cleared it.
- Notes and attachments.
How it behaves
What it posts
The line items debit their expense ledgers (and input tax where it applies); the credit goes to the payment account or to payables. Coding each line to the right account is what makes the profit and loss meaningful, so a phone bill lands in Telephone, not a catch-all.
Ledger Change
Even after a bill is posted, you can retroactively re-code it to different expense accounts. This is the correct way to fix a miscoding: the payment stays intact and only the expense classification moves, rather than cancelling and re-entering the whole document.
Lifecycle
A bill runs Draft, Verify, an optional Acceptance stage while MyInvois validates it, Pending payment, then Complete, with Cancel available. The e-invoice stage only appears where it is enabled.
Worked example
A single electricity invoice covers two sites. You enter two lines coded to each site's utilities ledger, pay it from the company current account, and post. A month later you realise one line was coded wrong and fix it with Ledger Change, leaving the payment untouched.
Edge cases and good practice
- Bill, not purchase invoice, when there is no purchase order or goods receipt behind the cost.
- Contra a bill against a customer who is also a vendor, to net the two off.
- Ledger Change beats cancel-and-redo for fixing expense coding after posting.
Related
- How to: Pay a bill
- Reference: Chart of Accounts (expense coding)
- Reference: e-Invoice (MyInvois)