Bill VS Receipt?

RobWatts

I'm not sure how the workflow works for adding things you buy to run your business.

I see Bills and Receipts.. They seem totally separate but it seems like they should work together. Can someone explain?

This is what I've done:

I bought some supplies to run my business. I uploaded the receipt and then categorized the receipt as Production Supplies and set the payment account to Cash On Hand.

It was processed it seems but do I have to add a Bill and set the Vendor to the place I purchased my supplies from also?

Are bills and receipts two ways of doing the same thing? I don't want to double-post the same expense.

Samd

Hey @RobWatts - they can be, but you can always merge the receipt transaction with the bill payment transaction. For the most part though, you could record and upload your receipts as normal, and add a vendor to the transaction on the Accounting > Transactions page.

I would say what separates out the two functions, at least at a surface level, is bills can be used for tracking future expenses, whereas receipts are records of the payment after the fact. So, for items like rent for instance, you may want to track the money owed and eventual payment via bills, but a business lunch would be something you bookkept after the expense was incurred and paid. You could certainly create a bill for a future one-off expense, but I think a simple way of looking at at what you should use when would be bills are for when incurring the expense and payment occur at different times, whereas receipts largely happen simultaneously. Of course, there will be some overlap depending on the expense, and as long as items aren't double reported without being merged, you can use both feature as fit best with your workflows.

RobWatts

thank you. that does help.

vinlim

That is useful, the separation of function is helpful too. However, is it possible to also attach a scanned copy of the bill?

kevo

Thanks Samd. Vinlim's question goes for me too. I've entered a recurring invoice (for Zoom) as a bill from a Vendor. Should I also put in the picture of the invoice in Receipts?

Barsin

Hey there @vinlim

Depending on the format of the bill our OCR (optical character recognition) may not be able to automate this, but if you do have success in manually entering the values in then you should be able to merge the receipt transaction with your bill.

Hi @kevo

At this time Wave does not have a way to attach an image to invoices. Uploading a receipt transaction will actually creating an expense transaction that cannot be merged into your invoice income transactions. Hope this answers your question!

Elacra

@Barsin

Could you please explain how to "merge the receipt transaction with your bill"? I added a Zoom invoice as a bill and as a receipt so that I can capture the invoice but now I see the same expense twice.

Thanks

BigLittleParties

I have uploaded a number of receipts but now they are not shown on the reports. Does someone know why?

Moshell

@BigLittleParties
Did you categorize the receipts? You can't simply upload the receipt images via the phone app or via email. You need to go the receipts page under purchases, select the receipt, and complete the classification, and then post to accounting. Although the expense is sometimes automatically recommended by the software, you need to review it. You also need to select from which account the receipt/expense was paid from (e.g. petty cash, bank account, etc).
Hope this helps