This is where you enter bills (Vendor Invoices) that you owe your vendors or view bills that you have already paid. These bills may have been entered manually (non-trade bills such as utility or office expenses rent) or automatically from Sales Orders or Purchase Orders.
This is also the place you go to select Bills for payment and to Print A/P Checks.
Special Keystrokes
You enter each bill as a vendor invoice. These invoices appear as Line Items in a browse box. From the browse, the following special keystrokes are available:
| <Ins> | Create a new bill to be paid. |
| <Del> | Deletes an invoice if a check has not been printed for it or it has not already been posted to the G/L.
If the Bill has already been posted to the G/L, the transaction is voided, meaning that the Status field is set to V and all Line Item are removed from the transaction. If the Bill has already been paid on a check, pressing <Del> voids the entire check on which the Bill was paid. |
| <Ctrl-Spacebar> | Tag an unpaid invoice for payment. When you tag an invoice for payment, you are prompted to enter the amount you wish to pay in the Amount To Pay field (the default being the entire amount due). The other available field is Purchase Discount that you can use to enter any discounts to be taken. The amount entered in the Amount To Pay field will be credited to your Cash account when the Check is posted, and any discount will be debited to your Purchases Discount account. |
| <Right Click> | In addition to letting you add, change or delete records, right clicking also enables two other features:
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Special Buttons
[Find]  |
Locate any record using the Query Window. |
| [Source] | If this transaction was generated from a sales order you can view the sales order from which it came by pressing [Source] while viewing any line item. |
Activities]  |
Lists the Activities linked to the Sales Order linked with this vendor invoice. These can be tracked for the Contact to which they are linked and to any Vendor P.O.s linked to the same Sales Order ID. |
| Tag All] | Tag all invoices eligible for payment. This button has two modes:
Your selected number of days is saved for each user. To automatically tag all open invoices, enter 999 in the Number of Days field. |
| [Untag All] | Untag all tagged Bills.
Use this before tagging bills to pay to insure no Bills are accidentally tagged or after Voiding a check run to prevent accidentally re-printing voided checks with invoices still marked for payment. |
| [Manual] | Apply credit to Vendor Invoice paid by a hand-written check or cash. You can also use this to enter payments for invoices as they are entered. |
| [Print] | This button lets you print a variety of reports and forms, including: |
| Checks | Generate and Print Checks for the selected item or for all tagged invoices for which checks have not been printed. |
| Envelopes | Print standard envelopes for each vendor. |
| Charge Authorization | You can also reprint a Charge Authorization Form if the item was paid via Credit Card. |
| Reports | Print a selection report for bills using the Query Window and Print A/P Checks. |
| Export | Export A/P Bills to a number of other data formats. |
| [Convert] | Convert a One Time Vendor to a regular Vendor ID. This creates a new record in the vendor main data file and converts the selected invoice to the new ID. You are prompted for an ID to use for the new vendor. The vendor’s address and phone numbers are taken from the selected invoice.
This button is only visible under the Name tab. |
| [Recurring] | Create a Recurring Vendor Invoice. This creates a new recurring transaction template from the selected invoice that you can then use to automatically enter a new bill for you on a regular basis. This does not create a journal transaction; once the recurring template has been created, you must go to Recurring Vendor Invoices to generate the appropriate live transaction.
This button is only visible under the Transaction ID tab. |
Tabs
| Vendor/Invoice | Display open invoices by Vendor ID/Invoice Date.
Pressing the [One Vendor] button at the lower left selects a single a vendor to display. Pressing the same button again, returns the browse to displaying all Bills. |
| Name | Display all invoices, paid and open, by Vendor Name. |
| Open By Vendor | Display open invoices by Vendor ID/Invoice Date. You can press the [One/All Vendors] button at the lower left to limit the displayed bills to the currently selected Vendor ID or change it back to view all vendor invoices. |
| Open By Discount | Display open invoices in order of date due or last discount date, sub-sorted by Vendor ID. This means that the most urgent bills appear at the top, while the least pressing appear at the bottom. |
| Order ID | Sort and locate any bill by the Sales Order ID from which it was automatically generated. If you created an A/P Bill here but included a Sales Order ID, it will also appear here. |
| Transaction ID | Display bills by the Transaction ID. |
| No Invoice | Display A/P Bills to which no invoice has been assigned. These are not included in your A/P aging, nor are they a part of your G/L. You also may not print checks for any A/P Bill without an invoice number. These entries result from entering a cost onto a sales order line item and invoicing the customer without entering the vendors invoice.
You should have very few blue colored bills. A large number of ‘blue bills’ often indicates a procedural problem in that many orders are being billed without checking the vendors invoices. |
| Query | Displays a set of bills using a Query Window. Press the [Query] button to select a Query to apply to the browse. |
Special Browse Columns
The first two columns of the browse are especially important in helping you see:
| ! Tagged | Is the order tagged for batch printing of checks? If the order is tagged you’ll see a green check mark. |
| SPayment Status | Displays the invoice’s progress. |
A WORD ABOUT COLOR IN VENDOR BILLS
Simple Accounting also uses color to make it even easier to see the progress of each Bill:
| Light Blue | No Invoice (Inactive) |
| Green | Open Credit |
| Light Red Open | Invoice |
| Red | Open Invoice (Past Due) |
| Black | Closed Invoice |
| Gray | Voided Invoice |
You tag records in