Bill Payments
This is the transaction you use to pay your vendors from one of your company's bank or cash accounts. You choose which bills, expenses or purchase receptions you're settling (in full or in part), AdmCloud calculates each document's remaining balance, and it automatically generates the payment's accounting entry.
What is it and what is it for?
A Bill Payment records money leaving a bank or cash account to a vendor or payee, and applies it against one or more open purchasing documents: Vendor Bills, Expenses and Purchase Receptions. When you save it, AdmCloud:
- Reduces each selected document's balance by the amount you apply to it.
- Generates the accounting entry: a debit to accounts payable (or the expense account) and a credit to your bank or cash account.
- Leaves it ready to print as a check, if that's your payment form.
- Can be issued in a different currency than your documents, calculating the exchange rate of each applied line.
Don't confuse it with these other similar Banking transactions:
- Account Payments is for money leaving your bank that posts directly against a ledger account (for example, an expense with no vendor bill on file), without going through a purchasing document.
- Vendor Prepayments is for money you hand a vendor before the bill you're going to pay even exists.
- Bank-to-Bank Transfers is for moving money between two of your own accounts, not out to a third party.
You can start a Bill Payment from scratch on this screen, or generate one directly from the pay button on an open Vendor Bill, Expense or Purchase Reception; in that case AdmCloud pre-loads the vendor, currency and document to pay for you.
How it's used
- Open "Payments" from the Banking menu. You'll see the list of payments already recorded, with filters by date, subsidiary, bank account, vendor, document number, reference and check number.
- Create a new payment with the add button, or duplicate an existing one to reuse its data.
- Fill in the payee (vendor or person being paid), the outgoing bank account, the date, the currency and, if it applies, the check number or the payment's reference.
- If you attach a receipt image or PDF before filling in the payment, and your company has automatic receipt recognition (OCR) available, AdmCloud can suggest the vendor, amount and date from the file for you.
- Adjust the documents table's period and click "Refresh" to see that vendor's open Bills, Expenses and Receptions. The period is a single date-range control: when you open it you can pick a relative period such as "This month" or set the from/to dates on the calendars.
- Check off the documents you're paying and type, on each one, the amount you want to apply (the full balance or a partial payment). If your company applies tax withholdings on payment, you can also enter the VAT/sales-tax and income-tax withholding for each document.
- Review the "Total Paid" and "Total Applied" totals at the bottom of the table; they should match what you're actually disbursing.
- Attach supporting files if you need to (a transfer receipt, a photo of the check, etc.) and save.
- If your company requires authorization for payments, the document stays pending until a user with permission authorizes or rejects it, either from its detail screen or from the centralized Payment Authorization inbox.
Key fields
| Field | What it's for |
|---|---|
| Beneficiary | The vendor or person the payment is issued to. Required, and it determines which open documents you can select. |
| Bank Account | Your company's bank or cash account the money leaves from. Required, and must be linked to a bank. |
| Date | The payment's date; determines which accounting period the entry is posted to. |
| Currency and Exchange Rate | The currency you're issuing the payment in. If an applied document is in another currency, the exchange rate converts the applied amount into the payment's currency. |
| Check Number | Identifies the payment's physical or virtual check, also used when printing it with Check Printing. |
| Reference | Free text to note a transfer number, bank confirmation or other tracking data. |
| Documents to pay | The Vendor Bill(s), Expense(s) or Reception(s) being settled, with the amount applied to each. |
| Discount Applied | An early-payment discount you deduct from the document's balance without it leaving your bank account. |
| VAT/Sales Tax and Income Tax Withholding | The amount withheld from the vendor on that document, if your company applies the withholding at the time of payment. Only shown when this feature is configured. |
| Notes | Internal remarks about the payment, visible on its detail screen. |
The payment's detail screen
Once saved, the payment's detail screen lets you, depending on your permissions:
- View the generated accounting entry, with a direct link to the Journal Entry.
- Pull up, in a separate window, other payments made to the same vendor, to review history before approving a new one.
- Print the payment (as a receipt or as a check, depending on the format configured on the bank account).
- Authorize, reject, mark as pending or send back to draft, if your company's authorization workflow requires it.
- Void the payment (reverses the accounting entry and releases the balance of the documents it had settled) or delete it entirely, as long as it hasn't been authorized or used on a bank reconciliation yet.
- Mark the payment as not printed, if you need to print it again from scratch.
- Review and download the payment's attachments, along with those of every document applied to it.
Validations when saving
- The Beneficiary is required.
- The Bank Account is required and must be linked to a valid bank. It must be active when you create or duplicate the payment; when you edit a saved one it keeps its account even if the account was made inactive afterwards, but you can't switch it to a different inactive account.
- The Currency must be a valid currency configured for your company.
- You must apply the payment to at least one document with an amount greater than zero.
- The same document can't be applied twice within the same payment.
- Each applied document must be in the payment's same currency, or have a valid exchange rate (between 0.01 and 999.99) to convert it.
- The sum of applied amounts, plus discounts and withholdings, can't exceed each document's outstanding balance or the payment's total amount.
- The payment's document number (DocID) can't repeat.
Tips and common errors
Generate the payment from the document you're paying (Vendor Bill, Expense or Reception) instead of creating it blank: AdmCloud pre-loads the correct vendor and currency, cutting down on typing errors.
"The applied amount exceeds the document's balance" shows up when you try to pay more than the document still owes; check whether a payment or a credit note has already been applied to it before continuing.
Can't find the bill you want to pay? Check the documents table's period (you can empty it with the control's clear button to stop filtering by date), and make sure the payment's beneficiary matches that bill's vendor exactly.
To batch-print the checks for your already-authorized payments, use the Check Printing screen; to generate the file you upload to your bank, use Bank Payment File Generation and Processing.
Availability
- Access is controlled by the "Payments" permission of the Banking module, with independent levels to view, add, edit, delete, void, authorize and reprint.
- Available from the Start plan onward (not included in the Billing plan). On the Enterprise plan, it requires the Accounting module to be active.
- With Subsidiaries enabled, each payment belongs to a specific subsidiary.
- The VAT/sales tax and income tax withholding columns only show up if your company has purchase-tax withholding configured to apply at payment time.
- Automatically suggesting data from an attached receipt (OCR) depends on your company having document recognition enabled.
- Generating the bank transfer file and sending it directly to Banco BHD León depend on your company having that feature enabled and configured under Payment Processing Settings.