Garage and hire invoices: Fleet › Invoices and vehicle bill lines

A garage invoice, a hire charge or a fuel bill is money you owe a supplier, so Maliru records it once, in Bills. Allocate a line to a vehicle and that line is the vehicle's running cost: nothing is typed twice.

Fleet keeps no invoice register of its own. The Invoices tab on the Fleet page shows the bills that name a vehicle. It says so on screen: "Fleet keeps no invoice register of its own. These are the bills that name a vehicle, and a bill line that names one is that vehicle's running cost. Commercial › Bills holds all of them, fleet or not."

The Invoices tab

The tab lists every bill with at least one line allocated to a vehicle, with its Supplier, Supplier ref, Vehicles, Issued date, Total and Status.

• Pick a vehicle in the Vehicle filter (Any vehicle by default) to see only its invoices.
• Search matches the supplier, the reference, the bill number and the registrations on it.
• Click a row to open the bill.
• Long lists end in a pager with Rows per page.

The tab needs Manage bills & expenses, not Manage vehicles, because it's the payables register. It appears while the Running costs feature is on.

Adding an invoice

• Upload invoice opens Read bills from their documents: "Drop in a supplier's invoice as a PDF or a photo. Maliru reads it and opens the bill form filled in — every figure is yours to correct, and nothing is recorded until you save it." You can add up to 10 documents at a time. Reading a document uses your workspace's AI allowance; see AI allowance, usage and top-ups.
• New bill opens a blank bill.

Either way, the bill form opens with every line asking Choose a vehicle. Pick the vehicle for each line; Maliru doesn't guess it from the registration printed on the invoice. A line can instead be allocated to a Job, an Asset or a Site, or left Not allocated.

Everything else about the bill — supplier, dates, tax, approval and payment — works as it does in Commercial. See Bills and suppliers.

When the cost reaches the vehicle

A line allocated to a vehicle becomes a confirmed entry in that vehicle's running costs once the bill is approved, part paid or paid. If your workspace doesn't require bills to be approved, a saved bill counts straight away.

• A draft, or a bill awaiting approval, doesn't count. The money hasn't been agreed.
• Disputing or voiding the bill takes the cost back out of the vehicle's figures.
• Changing a line's amount or vehicle on the bill updates the vehicle's entry.
• The cost category is taken from the bill's category wording. Vehicle maintenance lands as Maintenance, Plant hire as Hire, Diesel as Fuel; anything unrecognised lands as Other.

On the vehicle, the entry can't be edited or deleted: "This cost comes from a bill. Open the bill in Commercial to change it."

Costs from bills don't set off the running-cost alert rules; those fire for costs recorded in Fleet and for fuel-card imports.