How do I scan bills and vendor invoices into my accounting software?

Which capture routes does your software offer for vendor bills?

Routes, their names and the plans that include them vary by platform and edition, so confirm them in your own software's help. Four products show the range:

• QuickBooks Online. Intuit's article on Accounts Payable automation says AP Automation extracts info from bills you upload and automatically creates the transaction. You choose Upload from computer from the Add bill dropdown, and the bill is added to the For review tab. The same article says the feature may not be available in all accounts yet.

  Intuit's article on emailing receipts and bills adds a forwarding address ending in @assist.intuit.com, to which you can forward bills, including a photo taken on your phone. What arrives that way is reviewed and categorized in the Receipts tab, not among your bills. Turning it into a transaction belongs to receipt capture, a separate question; for bills, use Upload from computer.

• QuickBooks Desktop. Intuit's article on uploading bills to QuickBooks Desktop Pro Plus, Premier Plus or Enterprise starts from Vendors, then Upload and Review Bills. From there you can browse to files, email PDFs or images of bills to the company file, or upload from Google Drive, selecting up to 10 bills. Captures land in For Review (Vendors, then Bills), where you approve the match QuickBooks proposes or import the bill data to create a bill you edit and save.
• Zoho Books. Zoho's Documents help for Zoho Books describes a Documents Inbox with its own email address that vendors can send documents to directly, and uploads of single or multiple files from your computer or from cloud storage such as Google Drive. The same page says autoscan, which you are asked to enable on first opening Documents, captures data from every emailed or uploaded document on all plans, but once the free scans are used up it continues only with an add-on (50 autoscans per month); without autoscan, nothing is pre-filled.

• Dext, a connected capture app. Dext's article on submitting documents by email gives each user and account separate addresses for Costs and Sales documents, and another Dext article covers scanning and uploading in its mobile app. Dext's article on publishing to QuickBooks Online starts from the item in the Costs inbox and says an item published as a bill appears in QuickBooks Online as a bill waiting to be paid.

  That publishing article has you set Publish to as Bill for an unpaid bill; publishing as Cash, Check or Credit card makes it a paid transaction in QuickBooks Online instead. Under Business settings > Connections > Manage > Settings, check the default destination, and leave Auto-publish all items off, or set exceptions, for bills you want to check first: it publishes items as soon as they are marked as Ready.

A desktop scanner feeds these same routes: scan each bill to its own PDF, then upload it, email it to the capture address, or save it to Google Drive and upload it from there inside QuickBooks Desktop or Zoho Books. Intuit's and Zoho's instructions start that upload inside the software, so a scan saved to a folder is not captured by itself.

Which route suits your bill volume and the way bills arrive?

Uploading bills one file at a time is workable for a few a month. At a high monthly volume, prefer a route that takes documents without anyone opening the accounting software: an email-in address or a capture app. In QuickBooks Online, the bill route in Intuit's Accounts Payable automation article is Upload from computer, which takes files dragged into the Upload window; QuickBooks Desktop, Zoho Books and Dext also take bills by email. Dext's email article says PDFs sent to a Multiple address can be up to 200 pages, and Intuit's QuickBooks Desktop article allows several bill images in one email as long as the email is under 20 MB.

An email-in route captures only what reaches it from a sender it accepts, and who may send differs. Intuit's emailing article says QuickBooks Online takes mail from users you permit, sent from their QuickBooks sign-in address, and Intuit's Desktop upload article limits senders to Intuit account users listed under Manage Senders. So vendors cannot email either QuickBooks address directly. In QuickBooks Online, save the attachment of a bill that arrives by email and add it with Upload from computer, because Intuit's emailing article has you review what reaches the forwarding address in the Receipts tab, not among your bills. In QuickBooks Desktop, have vendors send bills to one monitored mailbox and forward them from the address of a user listed under Manage Senders. Zoho Books lets vendors email its Documents Inbox directly. In Dext, send bills to the Costs address, not the Sales one. Test the route from the exact address that will send in practice.

When a bill arrives as an email attachment, it is already digital. Send that file on; printing it to scan it again only loses sharpness. Dext's email article says Dext cannot extract password-protected attachments or documents from hyperlinks, so download a bill that sits behind a vendor-portal link and send the PDF itself.

Should a capture create a new bill or attach to one you already have?

Intuit's Accounts Payable automation article says Upload from computer creates the bill in QuickBooks Online's For review tab. In Zoho Books you create the bill yourself: Zoho's Documents help has you select the document in the Inbox, choose Bill from the Add to dropdown, check the pre-filled fields and create the transaction. In Dext, an item becomes a bill only when published as one. A plain attachment only stores the file on a record, and nothing reaches payables until someone keys the bill. Before each capture, decide which case applies:

Intuit's article on reviewing and managing bills says saving a bill from the For review tab adds it to the Unpaid tab, so a bill still in For review is not yet among your unpaid bills. Zoho's Documents help says a document clears from the Inbox once it is added to a new transaction, matched with an existing one or moved into a folder, so anything still in the Inbox has not yet been turned into or matched with a bill, and a folder move clears it without creating one. A queue of unsaved drafts looks like filing but leaves those liabilities out of payables, and a bank reconciliation will not reveal them because nothing has been paid.

How should you prepare each document so extraction works?

Get each document into this state before you capture it:

• One bill per file. Intuit's QuickBooks Desktop upload article says each image or file should only have a single bill, and Dext's article on rejected documents warns that an image with more than one receipt or transaction can confuse the system and result in incomplete data.
• Every page together. Keep all pages of one bill in one file. The next section covers how Dext handles such files; with other software, check your first multi-page bill for its full total and every page attached.
• Legible text. Dext's rejected-documents article lists blurry or low-resolution photos, torn, crumpled or damaged documents, and text too small or faint to scan as quality problems, and it recommends re-uploading a clearer version. Scan pages flat and upright, and rescan anything you cannot read easily on screen.
• An accepted file type. Intuit's Accounts Payable automation article lists PDF, JPEG, JPG, GIF and PNG for QuickBooks Online uploads, and Intuit's Desktop upload article lists the same types.

How do you handle multi-page bills, scanned batches and vendor statements?

Each of these breaks a one-page, one-file routine:

• A bill with several pages. Keep its pages in one file. Dext's email article says to use a Single address when each file you send contains one document, even if that file has multiple pages, and Dext's mobile app article offers a Combine mode for one document that spans multiple pages, up to 50 photos.
• A stack scanned in one pass. Split the scan into one file per bill before uploading it to QuickBooks or Zoho Books. Dext's email article describes a Multiple address, with one document per page, for files in which each page is a different document. A 14-page scan of 12 bills, two of them two pages long, would come out there as 14 items rather than 12, so send the two long bills separately to a Single address.
• A vendor statement listing several invoices. A statement is not a bill. AccountingTools' article on the difference between an invoice and a statement says it can be unwise to treat a statement as an invoice and pay the items listed on it. Capture each invoice as its own bill, use the statement to check that every invoice on it is already in your books, and ask the vendor for a copy of any you cannot find.

What should you check before you save the bill?

Extraction fills some fields and leaves the rest to you. Intuit's QuickBooks Desktop upload article says QuickBooks pulls dates, amounts, vendor and the last four digits of the credit card from the image, and Zoho's Documents help says the new transaction has pre-filled data like date, merchant name and amount from autoscan. Line detail is not always captured: Dext's Line Item Extraction article describes splitting documents into individual lines as a feature for practice users and for businesses whose subscription includes it. The same article says tax codes and tax rates are not extracted for each line and that unreadable parts of a document may leave fields blank, so set tax codes yourself and look for empty fields.

Compare these fields with the document image before saving, starting with the ones that decide who is paid and how much:

• Vendor. Confirm the draft matched the right vendor record, not a similarly named one, since a wrong vendor puts the balance on the wrong vendor's account and hides the bill from that vendor's duplicate check.
• Bill number. Type it exactly as printed, prefixes included, because duplicate checks compare it.
• Total and tax. Match the total to the document, and if lines were extracted, confirm they add up to that total.
• Bill date, terms and due date. Check each against the document so the bill falls due when the vendor expects payment.
• Account or category. Choose it deliberately rather than accept a suggestion, because it decides where the cost lands in your reports.

How do you catch a bill that has been captured twice?

A second entry channel creates duplicates in three ways: the same bill captured twice, a capture of a bill someone already keyed by hand, and one bill arriving by email and again on paper. The checks differ by product:

• Dext. Dext's article on duplicate Cost documents describes an Automatic mode, in which suspected duplicates are deleted once detected and can then only be found in the Submission history, a Review mode that flags them in the Costs inbox with an amber duplicate icon, and a setting in which no duplicate detection takes place. Dext's rejected-documents article adds that a file already submitted is refused with the message "This item already exists in your account."
• Zoho Books. Zoho's FAQ on repeating bill numbers says a bill number once entered cannot be repeated, except when it comes from a different vendor or from the same vendor in the next financial year.
• QuickBooks Online. Intuit's advanced account settings article lists warnings about duplicate transaction numbers among the preferences you can set but does not say whether they cover uploaded bills. Intuit's Accounts Payable automation article offers Delete this bill for pending bills sent by another QuickBooks user. Never save an uploaded duplicate.
• QuickBooks Desktop. Intuit's Desktop upload article says QuickBooks prompts you to Review the Bills if it finds a duplicate for a bill you upload to the register; if the duplicate is a bill someone already keyed by hand, approve the match For Review proposes instead of deleting the document, as the table says; if it is a second capture of a bill already captured, select Delete, which removes the captured bill data along with the uploaded bill.

Dext's duplicate modes act on items inside Dext, so before publishing, also search the vendor's bills and expenses in the accounting software for the same number and amount, as step 1 does. If a bill seems to have vanished while Automatic mode is on, look in Dext's Submission history before asking the vendor for another copy.

How do you find the document again later?

Open the saved bill and confirm that the document is attached and opens. Dext's article on publishing to QuickBooks Online says Dext attaches the original document image or PDF to every cost and sales item it publishes there. For a bill created any other way, check the saved bill the same way, and if the file is missing, attach it through Attachments as described for a bill keyed by hand.

Name each file so a person can find it without the software, with the vendor and bill number in letters and digits, such as AcmeSupply10482.pdf, because Intuit's attachments article says attachment file names can't contain special characters.

Zoho's Documents help says a document cleared from the Inbox, as it is once added to a bill, can no longer be retrieved there, so open it from the bill; to keep a copy in Documents, first move it into a folder, from which it can still be attached to a transaction. Outside the Inbox, Zoho's Advanced Search offers only a file name field, so name files as above. Dext's search article describes search, filters and advanced search tools for finding documents, including a filter for document reference. In the accounting software, find the bill by vendor or bill number and open its attachment from there.

What if your software has no capture route, or the capture app is unavailable?

The document still belongs on the bill. Key the bill from the document and attach the file as you would for any bill keyed by hand. If your software offers no attachment on bills at all, store the PDF under a name carrying the vendor and bill number, in a folder per vendor, and enter that bill number on the bill so either one leads to the other.

If a connected app is down or rejects a file, keep the original until it appears as an item. Dext's rejected-documents article says a rejected upload is not processed by the extraction engine, so no item is created. If you key urgent bills by hand while the app is unavailable, attach their files to those bills directly afterwards rather than resending them through the app, where they would return as new drafts.

What is the full sequence from document to posted bill?

Work through each bill in this order:

1. Search the vendor's bills and expenses for the bill number and amount. A match means the document goes on that record, whether an entered bill or an expense already paid, and you create no new bill.
2. Prepare one file per bill with all its pages and sharp text, and keep an emailed PDF exactly as it arrived.
3. Send the file through your route: an upload, the email-in address, the mobile app or the capture app.
4. Open the draft (in Zoho Books, open the document and choose Add to, then Bill), compare vendor, bill number, total, tax and dates with the image, and fill in the account and anything extraction left blank.
5. If step 1 found nothing, save or publish the draft so it becomes an unpaid bill (in Dext, with Publish to set to Bill). Otherwise, attach this document to the record step 1 found if it has none (Zoho Books: Merge; QuickBooks Desktop: approve the match; QuickBooks Online: open the record, select Attachments and the file, then Open, then Save and close).
6. Open the saved bill and confirm the document is attached and opens.
7. At the end of the week, resolve every item in For review, the Documents Inbox or the capture app's inbox: save or publish it as a bill, or attach it to an existing record, but never save or publish a confirmed duplicate. Intuit's articles on uploading and reviewing bills do not say how to remove an uploaded one from QuickBooks Online's For review tab.

Matching bank-feed transactions to records already in your books is a separate question. So is whether to enter bills at all or just record the expense when you pay.