Can I record supplier bills and what I owe?

Yes — as a full purchasing chain, not just a place to type bills. Raise a purchase order, record the delivery against it, enter the supplier’s bill, have it approved, and pay it. Bills are three-way matched against what you ordered and what actually arrived, so a short delivery or an overcharge is flagged before anyone approves it. Receipts can be photographed on a phone and become draft bills after a person checks the figures. Approvals are amount-banded per document type, payments settle several bills at once, and posting a delivery moves real stock.

Suppliers

A supplier record holds far more than a name and a phone number: company registration, tax and VAT numbers, payment terms, credit limit, bank details, lead time, minimum order quantity, contract dates, a rating, tags and notes, plus multiple addresses, phone numbers, email addresses and web pages.

Bills

A bill has its own numbering sequence, separate from your invoice numbering, an issue and due date, line items with their own taxes, an optional overall discount and shipping charge, and inclusive or exclusive tax like an invoice. Totals are always recalculated by Gridbind from the lines rather than trusted from the form. A bill can be cancelled, but not once a payment has been recorded against it — cancel the payment first.

Payments are recorded against a bill in full or in part. The methods are a fixed list — Cash, Card terminal, Bank transfer, e-Transfer, Cheque, Online payment and Other — and you cannot add your own names to it. “Other” takes a free-text reference and notes, which is where anything unusual goes.

Purchase orders, deliveries and matching

An order records what you have committed to buy. A delivery is received against that order, starting from what is still expected so a second delivery cannot duplicate the first, and posting it is what moves stock. The supplier’s bill is then compared against both.

That comparison is three-way matching: billed more than was received, more than was ordered, or above the price you agreed, and the bill is flagged with the line and the reason. It flags rather than blocks — paying anyway is often the right call, but it should be a decision somebody made rather than something nobody noticed.

Approvals

Bills and purchase orders go through approval before money moves. Policies set amount bands per document type, naming either specific people or anyone holding a permission, requiring all of them or any one. Bands cannot overlap, so exactly one rule applies to any amount. An approved bill locks; changing it means rejecting it back to draft.

Receipt capture

A receipt can be photographed on a phone, or uploaded as an image or PDF, and read automatically. What is read is shown as a suggestion beside the image and never as verified: a supplier must be chosen, the arithmetic must add up, and a person must tick to say the figures match the photograph before a draft bill can be created. That bill still goes through normal approval.

Foreign receipts ask for the rate you were actually charged rather than looking one up, and units are matched against your own measurement units rather than invented.

Multi-currency

Bills, orders and payments are held in the currency they were charged in, with an exchange rate converting them to your reporting currency. The document is never restated — you owe the supplier what they invoiced.

What Gridbind does not do here

• No supplier portal, and no way to email a bill. Bills are records you keep, not documents Gridbind sends out.
• No general ledger. There is no chart of accounts, no journal entries and no bank feed.
• No automatic matching of a receipt to an existing purchase order. A receipt-born bill is matched like any other, but its lines are not linked back to order lines automatically.