Bills

Bills is where you track the money going out — what your firm owes its consultants, vendors, and contractors — and record payments against it. It lives under the Finance section of the sidebar.

Before you start: Bills show financial information, so you’ll only see this area if your role allows it. See Roles and access.

What a bill is

A bill records an amount owed to a single payee. Each bill has:

An optional project it belongs to — leave it blank for a firm-level cost
A payee — a consultant, vendor, or contractor
A bill number, bill date, and optional due date
One or more line items
Optional retainage — an amount you’re holding back
A status that tracks where it is in its life

Line items

Each line on a bill describes part of what you’re being charged, with:

A description
An amount
Optional per-line tax
An optional cost code (the project phase the cost belongs to)
A reimbursable flag for pass-through expenses

The bill totals everything for you — subtotal, any retainage held back, tax, and the total.

Firm-level bills

Not every cost belongs to a job. Office rent, software subscriptions, insurance, and general overhead are costs to the firm itself. To record one, leave the Project field blank when you add or edit the bill — the field is optional, and the picker has a clear button to empty it.

A firm-level bill behaves like any other: it has a payee, line items, a document, and disbursements, and it shows in the Bills area and on its payee’s Bills tab with a dash in the Project column. The one difference is that it never counts against a project — it stays out of project budgets and the Profitability tab, since there’s no project to charge it to. It still appears in the firm-wide financial reports, including accounts payable aging and retainage.

Cost codes come from a project’s phases, so the cost code picker is unavailable on a firm-level bill.

Attaching the bill document

A bill is a document your firm receives — the consultant, vendor, or contractor produces their own invoice. You can attach that received document to the bill so the paperwork always stays with the record. On the add or edit screen, use Bill Document to upload a PDF or a scanned or photographed image. It’s optional, so you can record a bill before its document arrives and attach it later. Once attached, the bill’s details page shows a thumbnail; click it to read the document in a preview window, which can be expanded to fill the screen.

Bill statuses

A bill moves through these statuses:

Pending — Entered but not yet approved for payment.
Approved — Approved and ready to be paid.
Partial — Some payment made, but a balance remains.
Paid — Fully paid.
Void — Cancelled; no longer owed.

You change a bill’s status with the action buttons at the top of the page — Approve a pending bill when it’s ready, Rescind an approved bill back to pending if you need to edit it, or Void one that hasn’t been paid or credited. A bill automatically moves to Partial or Paid as you record disbursements or apply vendor credits.

Filtering the list by status

The Bills list has a row of buttons across the top — All, then one for each status. Pick one to narrow the list to just those bills; All is what you see when you open the page, so nothing is hidden until you choose. Your choice stays put as you page through and sort, and it’s part of the web address, so a link you bookmark or send to someone opens on the same view.

The same bar has more ways to narrow the list. The search box finds bills by bill number, payee name, or project name as you type, once you’ve entered at least two letters; click the × to clear it. All Payee Types lets you show only bills from consultants, vendors, or contractors. Overdue shows only bills that are past their due date and still have money owed. Everything you pick works together, and all of it is saved in the web address along with the status.

Recording payments

Open a bill to record disbursements as you pay it. The Disbursements tab appears once the bill is approved; a pending bill can’t be paid yet. Each payment captures the amount, the date paid, the method (check, credit card, direct deposit, wire transfer, cash, or other), and an optional reference. The bill keeps a running tally of how much has been paid and what’s still outstanding. A disbursement can’t be more than what’s still outstanding.

Vendor credits

When a payee gives you credit, such as for an overcharge or returned materials, record it as a vendor credit and apply it to their bill instead of editing the bill. A bill with credits applied shows Credited next to Amount Paid, and its Balance is what’s left after both. A Credits tab lists each credit applied to it.

If the payee has unused credit that could go toward the bill, the bill tells you so (“Acme Supply has $300.00 in available credit”) with an arrow that opens the payee, so no one pays in full while credit sits unused.

Where bills appear

You don’t have to go to the Bills area to find what’s relevant:

The Bills area under Finance lists every bill.
Each project has a Bills tab listing every bill charged to it, next to its Invoices tab.
Each consultant, vendor, and contractor has a Bills tab listing what you’ve been billed by them.

Every list shows the outstanding balance at a glance and links straight through to the full bill. The project and payee tabs end with a summary of the total billed, paid, credited and outstanding. It counts only approved bills — pending and voided bills are listed but left out of the totals — so Total minus Paid minus Credited is what’s Outstanding.

Profitability

Approved bills count as real project cost — they feed a project’s Profitability tab and the financial Reports, so sub-consultant and vendor spend is reflected in the firm’s financial picture automatically. Firm-level bills are the exception: with no project to charge, they’re left out of project profitability while still counting in the firm-wide reports.