Capture and Process Purchase Invoices, Pay Suppliers and Stay VAT-Ready

Capture It When You Get It

The easiest time to capture an expense is often while the receipt is still in your hand.

If an employee buys materials, fuel or another business expense using a company debit card, they can photograph the receipt or invoice using Snap & Send in the Big Red Cloud mobile app.

Choose Upload & Process and Big Red Cloud can start processing it immediately. Choose Upload Only and leave the document ready for someone in the office to review later.

For the employee, the workflow can be as simple as:

Pay → Snap → Send

That gets the supporting document into the accounts before it disappears into a pocket, van or desk drawer.

Supplier invoices that arrive another way can join the same workflow. Upload PDFs or images directly, or read them from email rather than re-keying them later.

Good Automation Starts Before the Invoice Arrives

The more Big Red Cloud already knows about a supplier, the less accounting has to be decided again on every invoice.

Supplier details can include VAT information and the purchase, nominal and analysis defaults normally used for that supplier. Purchase Importer can then use those settings when preparing future transactions. So supplier setup is part of the automation.

If the same supplier sends you the same kind of bill every month, there is little value in asking someone to make the same accounting decisions twelve times a year.

Set it up properly once and let Big Red Cloud reuse what you already know.

Know What You Owe and Pay It

A correctly processed invoice should leave you with more than a digital copy of a document. It should leave the supplier account right.

The Purchase Ledger brings together supplier invoices, credit notes, payments and outstanding balances, so you can see what the business owes and why.

When it is time to pay, record the supplier payment against the ledger and keep the balance up to date. Remittance advice can show the supplier which invoices or transactions the payment covers.

For purchases already paid using a company debit card, the corresponding payment can subsequently arrive through Open Banking. The bank records that money left the account; the Purchase Book preserves what was bought, who supplied it, how it was accounted for and the document behind it.

Those two sides ultimately need to agree.

Purchase VAT Is Only as Good as the Coding Behind It

Purchase VAT does not suddenly appear when the VAT return is due. Its accuracy is being determined as supplier invoices are processed throughout the period.

If the supplier, amounts, purchase type and VAT treatment are correct when the invoice enters the Purchase Book, the VAT records are being built as part of the normal purchase workflow.

That is another reason why the accounting matters more than simply extracting data from a document.

Our VAT and Irish accounting workflow goes deeper into the Revenue treatments and exceptions that arise when purchases and sales ultimately feed into the VAT return.

You Don’t Have to Do the Books Alone

Good purchase automation depends on good setup, and Big Red Cloud customers can get help with both.

Join live Purchase & Payment onboarding with the Customer Success team covering supplier setup, Snap & Send, email and manual uploads, duplicate checking and creating Purchase Book transactions.

The Knowledge Base provides step-by-step guidance afterwards, while Customer Success is there to help you get the workflow working properly for your business.

Get the setup right, capture the document when it arrives and let Big Red Cloud do more of the repetitive work each time.