Record a supplier invoice from your inbox

A supplier bill has landed in your inbox. This is the job that turns it into a purchase in the books: coded to the right accounts, checked against the bank, and then settled. Do it as documents arrive, or in one pass before you close the month.

Start from the document, not a blank form

Open the Inbox from the envelope icon in the top bar. The badge tells you how many documents are waiting. Each row shows the file, when it arrived and who sent it, next to what Sumly has already read out of it: the supplier, the amount and the date the invoice was sent.

Find the bill and click New purchase on its row. Sumly fills the draft in from the document. You check what it read, code the lines, then register the purchase and settle it. If nothing is waiting there, Get receipts and bills into your inbox covers how documents get there.

Check the header before the lines

The draft opens with the header already filled from the PDF: Supplier, Document no., Currency and Invoice date. Only supplier, currency and invoice date carry the asterisk that makes them required. Due date is left for you, and shows as a dash on the finished record if you leave it empty.

The currency comes from the invoice, not from your company, and the rate Sumly used sits under the field. Sumly carries the PDF across under Attachments, so the document travels with the entry. That is what you want when someone asks to see the records behind a figure. Select from inbox attaches another document to the same purchase.

If the supplier is not on the list yet, add them first. Add a customer or supplier walks through it.

Code every line to an account

Sumly fills in a description and an amount for each line it found. It leaves Account empty and sets VAT to None on every line. Click the Account cell and the chart of accounts opens, grouped by heading, numbered and searchable. Use + Add line if the bill needs a line the extraction missed.

Register purchase stays greyed out until every line has an account. That is the check. Nothing gets posted half-coded.

Check the bank before you register

At the bottom of the draft, the Payment block has a This purchase is already paid checkbox and a Scan for matching bank transactions button. Scanning looks through the bank accounts you have connected to Sumly and matches the bill against a transaction that actually left one of them. It opens Matching bank transactions with the candidate it found: the supplier name, which account the money left, the value date and the amount.

You then choose. Use details… takes the match. Close leaves the draft as it is. If the bill is in a foreign currency, the bank line is in euro while the invoice total is not, so the two figures will not read the same. That is the exchange rate, not a bad match.

Register it, then settle it

With every line coded, Register purchase turns solid. Click it and the purchase becomes a read-only record: the header, the coded lines with Net, VAT and Amount, the supplier's VAT number, the attachment, and an Invoice balance panel. View bookkeeping traces it through to the journal.

Registering a purchase does not pay it. The balance panel reads Unpaid, with the full amount Outstanding, until you record the money leaving. Register payment opens the New transaction dialog on the Match tab, which looks through your bank feed for the settling transaction. Payment and Refund are separate tabs beside it.

To enter the settlement by hand, switch to Payment. It asks for the date, Paid from for the bank account the money left, and the amount, with the invoice total offered beside the field. Tick The bank charged a fee if the bank took a cut on the way. Then Register payment.

When a bill never reached your inbox

Open Purchases from the top nav. Drafts sits above All purchases, so a half-finished purchase does not disappear on you. + Register purchase opens an empty form and you fill the header and the lines in by hand. Nothing is read off a document here, but Sumly still suggests suppliers from your previous data, and the dropdown lists each one with its VAT number. A purchase started this way defaults to Euro (EUR) rather than the supplier's currency, so change it if the bill is not in euro. Everything after that is the same: code the lines, Register purchase, then Register payment.

Frequently asked

Why is Register purchase greyed out?

A line still has no account. The button only becomes clickable once every line on the purchase is coded. Scan down the Account column for the empty cell.

The bank match shows a different figure to the invoice. Is it the wrong transaction?

Not necessarily. A bill in a foreign currency is invoiced in the supplier's currency and paid out of your account in euro, so the two amounts will not match. Check the date and the supplier name rather than the number.

Does registering a purchase mark it as paid?

No. A registered purchase sits as Unpaid with the full amount Outstanding until you register a payment against it. Posting the bill and paying it are two separate entries, so your supplier balance is right on any day of the month.

The supplier is not in the dropdown. What now?

Add them first. The dropdown lists each supplier with its VAT number, which is what the purchase carries through to the finished record. The walkthrough on adding a customer or supplier covers it.

That is one supplier bill in the books and settled. Money in is the other half of the month, so the next walkthrough is Create and send a sales invoice.