Vendor statements

What this does

A parts supplier with a trade account sends a statement every month listing invoices, credits, and payments. Vendors → Vendor Reconciliation is where you check it against what you've entered: every invoice on the statement should be a bill in the app, every credit a vendor credit, every payment a bill payment. Lines that don't match are either something you never entered or something the vendor got wrong.

Before you start

accounting.manage, the statement in hand, and the vendor's bills entered for the period.

Steps

New Statement. Vendor, Statement Date, Period Start and Period End, Previous Balance, and Notes. Manual entry is the only mode today; From Document (extracting lines from a scanned statement) is marked coming soon.

On the statement page, Add Line Item for each line: Type (Charge, Credit, Payment), Date, Reference / Invoice #, Description, Amount. Then for each charge or credit line:

• Match opens a search of the vendor's bills; pick the one this line is, or Create New Bill & Match when the invoice was never entered.
• Dispute marks a line you believe is wrong (an invoice you never received, an amount that differs); the statement counts it as disputed for your call to the vendor.
• Ignore sets a line aside.
• Unmatch undoes a match.

Run Auto-Match tries to pair unmatched charge and credit lines with bills by reference number, marking an exact-amount pair matched and a reference match with a different amount disputed. It compares the statement reference to the app's own bill number, not to the vendor invoice number you typed in Vendor Invoice # (Ref), so it rarely finds anything today; match by hand.

Mark Reconciled closes the statement when every line is matched, disputed, or ignored. The statement's status moves through Pending, Reconciling, Partial match, and Reconciled (or Disputed).

What happens in the books

Matching, disputing, and marking reconciled post nothing. Create New Bill & Match creates an approved bill for the line's amount and reference with no expense account on it, so open that bill afterward and set the account before it's paid; until then its accrual can't post.

Common problems

The statement balance doesn't equal my open AP for the vendor. Add up the disputed lines and any unentered invoices you just created; the difference should be exactly those. If not, a payment is missing on one side: a check you wrote that the vendor hasn't applied, or a payment the vendor shows that you never recorded.

An invoice is on the statement twice. Match one, dispute the other.

The vendor applied my payment to the wrong invoice. Their allocation doesn't change your books. Match by amount and note it on the statement.