Bills and suppliers

Invoices record what a client owes you. Bills record the other direction: what the workspace owes, so nothing is paid late and nothing is paid twice.

A bill is anything a company sends you to pay — a supplier invoice, a hire charge, a utility bill, an insurance renewal, a subcontractor's application. It carries a due date, an amount payable and a paid state.

Bill or expense? Someone in the team paid at the counter or on their own card and wants it back: that is an expense. A company sent you a document to pay by a date: that is a bill. See Expenses and reimbursements.

Where to find it

Commercial › Bills, for people who hold Manage bills & expenses — the permission for the money-out desk, separate from Manage commercial, which prices and bills your own work. A bookkeeper can be given one without the other: with only Manage bills & expenses, Commercial opens on an Overview of the money going out, with the Bills and Expenses tabs and the Measures tab everyone has for recording their own work. The rest of it (Contracts, Rate cards, Invoices, Valuations, Variations and the money coming in on the overview) needs Manage commercial. See The Commercial overview.

Bills has its own row of areas: Bills, Purchase orders (once switched on), Recurring, Payment runs, Deductions and Suppliers.

The register opens on a strip saying where the workspace stands, one per currency — amounts in different currencies are never added together:

• Owed — everything unpaid, and how many bills that is.
• Due soon — what falls due inside your due-soon window.
• Overdue — what is already late, and how late the oldest is.
• Awaiting approval — how many bills are waiting for a person, and their value.

Click a figure to show those bills, or use the Show filter: All, Awaiting approval, Due soon, Overdue, Disputed or Paid. The strip itself does not change with the filter — opening Paid does not make what you owe read as zero.

View: at the head of the toolbar saves the search, the Show filter and the sort as a view, just for you or for the office — see Saved views.

Each row shows the Supplier, their reference, Category, what it is Allocated to, Issued and Due dates, Total, Payable and Status. A bill past its due date reads Overdue 9 days rather than as approved, because that is what you need to see first. A bill filed from a phone reads From the field · no supplier yet until the office chooses the account — see Filing a delivery note or receipt from the phone.

Recording a bill

New bill opens the form. Choosing the Supplier fills in what it can: their payment terms set the due date, their default category and tax treatment are chosen, and for a subcontractor the deduction appears with the amount payable underneath. Add a supplier… in the list adds one without leaving the form.

You only type what the paper says: the Supplier reference (their own invoice number), a Title, the Category, the Issue date, Due date and Received on date, the Net amount and the tax. Under Where it belongs, say what it was spent on: the Job, and For one Vehicle, Asset, Site or Contract. Both are optional and they go together: a hire charge for an excavator on a job is a cost of the excavator and of the job. With neither, the bill is an overhead the workspace carries. Hired kit that isn't in your register yet can be added from the Asset list with Add a hired item…: say what it is, and the hire company, their reference and the on- and off-hire dates. The hire company starts as the bill's supplier, and the item goes into Assets as hired. Attach the document itself under Attachments — the supplier's own invoice is what an audit asks for.

Kind is Bill or Supplier credit. A bill cannot be negative: money coming back from a supplier is recorded as a supplier credit, which reduces what you owe them.

Splitting a bill across what it covers

Add a line splits a bill: "One garage invoice for four vans is four lines, one van each." Each line has a description, a category, a quantity, rate and amount, and under them its own Job and For. A line that leaves either empty takes the bill's from Where it belongs, and says so: From the bill: JCB 3CX. A description that names a van's registration, or an asset's tag or reference, chooses it for you (Found in the description.) until you choose something else. The copy button at the end of a line puts its job and For on every line. The lines must add up to the net — if they do not, the form says by how much, and Set net to the lines' total fixes it.

Once the bill is approved, a cost against a vehicle also shows as a running cost on that vehicle in Fleet, whether a line names the van or the whole bill does.

What was put against an asset, a site or a contract shows in that record's Costs, for people who hold Manage bills & expenses: what was Spent (approved bills and expenses, before tax), what is still Pending approval, and each bill line, which opens its bill. Only your workspace's currency is added up.

Reading it off the document

Faster still: choose Upload and drop in the PDF or a photo. Read bills from their documents takes PDF, PNG, JPG, WebP or GIF files up to 25 MB each, up to 10 at a time, and reads them one after another. Each row says where it has got to — Waiting, Uploading, Reading, Ready, Failed.

Check and save opens the bill form filled in: supplier, reference, dates, amounts and lines. Nothing is recorded until you save. Anything the reader could not make out, or read into doubt, is listed above the form — a supplier not on your list yet, lines that do not add up to the total, a due date before the invoice date, a reverse charge. The due date is worked out from stated terms too: Net 30 on an invoice dated 20 August becomes 19 September. Where the paper says nothing, the supplier's own terms apply.

Reading documents needs a plan with AI (Team and above) and uses your AI allowance — see AI allowance, usage and top-ups.

The same paper twice

If a document is already recorded, the row says Already recorded as BILL-0042 and offers Open the existing bill or Save anyway:

• The same file — you can save it anyway if it genuinely is a second bill.
• The same supplier reference for the same supplier — saving is refused, whether the bill was read or typed: "INV-88213 is already recorded for this supplier as BILL-0042." Change the reference if it really is a different invoice.

Approving, returning and disputing

Approvals are a setting, off by default. With them off, saving a bill makes it owed straight away. With Bills need approving on, saving submits it, and it waits for someone other than the person who entered it to choose Approve. The "… is waiting for approval" notification goes to everyone with Manage bills & expenses — never to whoever entered the bill. Return sends it back to draft with a note saying what needs correcting.

Dispute parks a bill with a note. It stays visible, drops out of what is due, and cannot be paid until you choose Clear dispute, which puts it back where it was.

Void cancels a bill with a reason; it stays in the register marked void. A draft is removed with Discard instead, and a bill that was ever approved can only be voided. A bill with payments recorded against it cannot be voided until they are removed.

Paying

Record payment writes down that your bank paid. "Maliru keeps the record; it never moves money." On an approved bill:

• Amount — leave it blank to settle the balance, or enter part of it. A negative amount records a refund the supplier paid back.
• Paid on, Method (Bank transfer, Direct debit, Card, Cash, Cheque, Offset against a credit or Other), Reference and an optional note.

Part payments are ordinary: the status follows the payments — Part paid, then Paid — rather than being set by hand. The bill's Payments list shows each payment and what is still owed; a bill paid more than it was for counts as paid and says £20.00 overpaid. Remove payment is for a payment that was never made or went against the wrong bill.

To settle a stack of bills with one bank payment, see Paying a stack of bills and telling suppliers what it covered.

Working on many at once

Choose Select and tick bills. The bar totals what is still owed and offers:

• Status — Send for approval, Approve, Return to filer or Dispute, with one note for all of them where a note is needed.
• Void and Discard.
• Record payment — one payment run for the lot.

Each bill is handled in turn and the result says what happened — Approved 4 of 6 — with the reason the rest were left.

Suppliers

The Suppliers tab holds who you buy from, with their Code, contact and Terms and what you Owe them. Add supplier records:

• Supplier details — Name and Code (your own reference for them).
• Contact — name, email, phone and address.
• Remittance advice — a Remittance email and Send them remittance advice.
• Defaults on their bills — Payment terms (days), Default category, Default tax treatment and Default tax rate %.
• Subcontractor deduction — only for subcontractors whose payments have tax withheld at source. See What was withheld from subcontractors.
• Active — archived suppliers stay on existing bills; they just stop being offered.

No bank details are kept. Maliru records that a payment was made; it never makes one.

Each supplier has a Statement: every bill oldest first, with a running balance and what is outstanding and overdue. Check their statement compares the supplier's own statement with your bills — see Checking a supplier's statement against your bills. A supplier that already has bills cannot be deleted; archive it instead.

Bringing your history in

Import takes the spreadsheet you already keep. Upload a .xlsx or .csv, or paste rows, then say which column is which: supplier, their reference, description, category, invoice and due dates, net and tax amounts, tax treatment, currency, paid or owed, and date paid. Up to 1,000 rows at a time.

Suppliers are created as they are met. A row your sheet marks as paid is recorded as paid. Imported bills arrive approved rather than waiting for approval: this is history you have already lived through. Anything already on the ledger is skipped with the reason, so importing again after fixing a few rows does not duplicate the ones that worked.

Handing it to your accounts package

Export produces the supplier-bill file for Xero, QuickBooks Online or Sage 50 for a date range, with an optional Nominal account code ("Leave blank for the purchases nominal"). Drafts and bills still waiting for approval are left out — they are not yet what the workspace owes. On the Free plan an export counts as one of the month's exports.

Being told

A bill coming due is notified once, and a late bill is chased no more than weekly until it is paid. A draft, or a bill still waiting for approval, is chased too, and the notice says it is not approved yet. Both notices go to everyone with Manage bills & expenses. Several bills at once come as one notice, 4 bills are due soon or 3 bills are overdue, naming the first to fall due or the oldest.

The dashboard has Bills overdue, Bills due soon, Bills awaiting approval and Bills owed cards, each opening the register on exactly those bills, plus Cash position (money in against money out) and Spend by category. In the alert rule builder you can react to a bill being entered, approved, returned, disputed, voided, paid, falling due or running late, and address the rule to Bills & expenses managers.

Settings

Bill settings (the tune icon on the register) has two tabs:

• Categories — the list a bill is filed under: add, rename, reorder, give each an icon, or remove. Renaming leaves bills already filed with the wording they were filed under.
• Numbering and approvals — the Number prefix of Maliru's own bill number (BILL- to start with); the Due soon window, 1 to 60 days, which drives the Due soon view, the dashboard card and the first reminder; Bills need approving; and Use purchase orders with Orders need approving (see Purchase orders).

Turning approvals on when only one person can approve is allowed, and Maliru warns you: nobody can approve their own bill, so everything that person enters will wait.

What Bills deliberately does not do

• It does not pay anything. No payment initiation and no bank details.
• It is not a ledger. It feeds Xero, QuickBooks or Sage rather than replacing them.
• It never adds amounts in different currencies together.
• It never refuses a bill for want of a purchase order. Orders are optional; a bill can be matched to one, never made to wait for one.