Bills & suppliers

Bills are the purchase-side mirror of invoices: documents your suppliers send you, tracked from arrival to payment. Both live in the sidebar under Purchases.

Suppliers

A supplier record under Purchases → Suppliers holds the identity you deal with: display and company name, email, phone, website, address, tax and registration numbers, a default currency, default payment terms, notes and tags. Bills you enter are linked to a supplier, and the supplier page shows their bills and recent expenses together.

Expenses captured with a free-typed vendor name are not automatically linked. The supplier page lists matching vendor spellings as candidates, so you can link a supplier's history to their record one click at a time.

Suppliers with bills cannot be deleted — archive them instead, which retires them from pickers while keeping their history readable. Deleting a supplier without bills detaches their expenses and recurring templates; those keep the vendor text and lose only the link.

Entering a bill

Go to Bills → New. Unlike an invoice, the number is the supplier's own — enter it as printed on their document; PulseBooks stores it verbatim and rejects a duplicate from the same supplier. Set the bill date, payment terms (the due date follows automatically, or set it by hand), the supplier, and the currency.

Line items carry a description, a category, a quantity and a unit price. The category on each line is what the expense posts to when the bill is approved, so it is worth getting right before approval.

A new bill is always saved as a draft. Nothing is sent to the supplier — they sent the document to you — and nothing has touched your books yet.

The bill lifecycle

• Draft — editable, not yet in your books, and the only state a bill can be deleted in.
• Awaiting payment — you approved it. Approving posts the bill to the ledger: each line's category is debited and Accounts Payable is credited, which is what makes the payable real. From this point the bill can no longer be edited — correct anything wrong before approving.
• Partially paid / Paid — as payments are recorded against it.
• Overdue — past its due date with a balance outstanding.
• Cancelled — the bill stops counting towards what you owe and can no longer be edited or paid. A bill with payments recorded against it cannot be cancelled or deleted; reverse the payments first.

Recording and reversing payments

Record Payment on the bill page takes an amount (up to the balance still owed), date, payment method, and an optional reference and notes. Partial payments are fine. Each payment creates a linked expense transaction, so what you paid shows up in your books alongside everything else.

For a foreign-currency bill the payment can carry its own exchange rate — PulseBooks suggests the most recent published rate and says how old it is. Left blank, the payment settles at the rate frozen on the bill; a different rate is what produces a realised FX gain or loss. See Multi-currency.

Mark as paid is the shortcut: it records one payment for the full remaining balance.

A payment recorded in error can be reversed from the bill's payment history. Reversing deletes the payment and its linked expense transaction, reduces the amount paid, and moves the bill's status back accordingly.

Remittance advice

Each recorded payment has a Send remittance advice action that emails the supplier a one-page PDF advice for that payment — enough for their bookkeeper to allocate it without asking. It is sent on demand, never automatically, so a corrected and re-entered payment does not generate three advices for one transfer. A supplier with no email address on file is simply skipped.

Keeping an eye on what you owe

The bills list shows outstanding, overdue and paid totals per currency, and can be filtered by status and supplier and exported to CSV. For the ageing view — how late each payable is, bucketed the same way as the receivable side — see the Payables Aging report under Reports (Pro and Business plans).

If you reconcile bank statements, a statement line can be matched to the expense transaction a bill payment wrote — see Reconciliation.