Zoho Inventory

Bills

When your vendor supplies goods/services to you on credit, you’re sent an invoice that details the amount of money you owe him/her. You can record this as a bill in Zoho Inventory and track it until it’s paid.

Lets see an overview of all operations related to Bills.

Managing Bills
Recording Bill payments

Bills Workflow Diagram

Bills workflow


Bill Status

The status of your bills can be viewed from the Bills tab drop down as shown below,


Creating a bill

To create a bill in Zoho Inventory,

Screen shot of bill creation buttons

Screen shot of bill creation page

Pro Tip: Instead of searching for the items from the list, you can select an item by scanning its barcode. When you scan the same barcode more than once, the quantity of the item gets incremented automatically.

Selecting multiple items

Alternatively,

screen shot of creating bills from contacts

Insight: When you create standalone bills, you can mark them as Received to reconcile the physical stock of the underlying items. Learn more.

From Purchase Order

A purchase order that is in the Issued status can be converted to a bill. To do so:

screen shot of creating bills from purchase orders


Creating bills for items with serial numbers

If you’re raising a bill for items which have serial numbers, there are few additional steps that need to be done.

Bill with serial numbers 1

Note: You can enter up to 1000 serial numbers in a transaction.

Bill with serial numbers 2

Bill with serial numbers 3

The End Result:

screen shot of a successful bill

Note: Similarly, you’ll be able to record bills for composite items that are serial number tracked.

Insight: If you prefer to track serial/batch numbers in packages, purchase receives and sales return receipts, go to Settings > Preferences > Items. Under Advanced Inventory Tracking, choose Track in packages, purchase receives and return receipts option.


Recording bills for batch tracked items

Add batches option in bills

Example: Let’s say that you have purchased 20 packs of a disposable item, not necessarily from the same vendor, out of which a few packs expire in the next two days and the rest in a week. Here, you can split the 20 packs into two batches based on its expiration date. Thereby, tracking the number of packs belonging to different batches and determining the batch from which sales should be made.

Entering batch details

Note: You can enter up to 100 batch numbers for each line item, and a total of 5000 batches per transaction.

Field Name Description
Batch Reference# A unique number which will serve as a reference for you to save and track your batches in Zoho Inventory. This is not the manufacturer batch number.
Manufacturer Batch# Batch number provided by your manufacturer.
Manufactured Date The date on which the item was manufactured.
Expiry Date The date until which the item is consumable.
Quantity in Quantity of the item that you wish to add in each batch.

Insight: You can enter decimal quantity (up to 6 decimal places) for batches. For instance, a certain quantity of milk has to be divided into batches. In Zoho Inventory, you will be able to add 1.91L in batch 1 and 3.560L in batch 2 and so on.

Note:

  • The bill should be in any state between Open and Paid to be able to use the batches in invoices or item adjustments.
  • If you have enabled the approval process for bills, then your bill must be in Approved state.

Bill with batches

Insight: If you prefer to track serial/batch numbers in packages, purchase receives and sales return receipts, go to Settings > Preferences > Items. Under Advanced Inventory Tracking, choose Track in packages, purchase receives and return receipts option.


Raising a bill for multiple purchase orders

You can associate many purchase orders and create a single bill for them if the purchase orders are issued to the same vendor.

Important Note: Purchase orders that are billed together must be associated to the same vendor and all purchase orders that need to be billed must be in Issued status.

To do so:

Bill for multiple purchase orders

issued PO popup


Landed Costs

Landed cost of a product is the cost involved in bringing a product to the seller’s warehouse excluding the cost of goods. This usually includes freight, shipping charges, customs and other charges that the seller may incur till he procures the goods.

By tracking the landed costs, you can calculate the exact amount spent on receiving the product. This, in turn, helps you to decide the selling price for your stock without compromising your profits.

Enabling Landed Costs

You must first enable landed costs for your organization. To do so:

Enabling landed cost feature in Zoho Inventory

Note: Ensure that you have enabled inventory tracking for the items for which you wish to allocate landed costs.

Allocating Landed Costs

Once you have enabled Landed Costs for your organization, you will be able to add and allocate them to the items in your bills.

Step 1: Adding Landed Costs to Bills

Adding landed cost to a bill in Zoho Inventory

Step 2: Allocating Landed Costs to Items in the Bill

Once you have added the landed costs to a bill, you will be able to allocate them to the bill items proportionately. There are two ways to do this:

1) Allocating landed costs while creating a bill:

Insight: You can also choose not to allocate any landed costs to that particular bill and allocate them to other bills.

Allocating landed costs to items in a bill in Zoho Inventory

2) Allocating the landed costs to an existing bill:

Allocate landed cost on bill

Allocate landed cost on bill

Note: You can also edit bills created earlier to add landed costs to them and allocate it.

Allocating Landed Costs from One Bill to Another

There may be cases where your vendor does not offer any shipping for the product and you get it shipped by another shipping agency, in that case, you can create a separate bill with just the landed costs and apply them to another bill. You can also apply any unused landed costs from other bills. To do this:

Allocating landed cost to another bill


You can associate bills with purchase orders that were created separately in Zoho Inventory.

To do so:

Warning:

  • The vendor addressed to must be the same in both documents.
  • The purchase order date cannot fall after the bill date.
  • The bill must contain one or more of the items mentioned in the purchase order. They cannot be linked in case of items mismatch.
  • The purchase order cannot be void, cancelled, closed, dropshipped or backordered.
Linking bills to purchase order 1 Linking bills to purchase order 2

The selected bills will be linked to its respective purchase order. The linked purchase order will be moved to the ‘Issued’ status if it is still in draft.


Import Bills

To import bills into your Zoho Inventory account:

Import Bills option

Learn in detail the steps to import a file in Zoho Inventory.

You can link your bills in to its corresponding purchase orders in bulk while importing them. To do so,

Option to link bills to PO during import Map receives number and PO number

The purchase orders in the Draft status will be moved to the Issued status automatically when they are linked to bills or purchase receives.


Other Options with Bills

screen shot of all options

Important Note: Bills that are partially or fully paid cannot be edited.


Multi-warehouse Operations related to Bills

If you’ve enabled multiple warehouse management for your organization, you will have additional operations related to the Bills. To know more, click here.


Bill Payments

Recording from bill

To record a bill payment:

screen shot of recording payment


Sorting and Viewing Bills

You can sort bills by created time, date, Bill#, vendor name, due date, amount and balance due. This can be done by clicking on the menu icon on the right top corner of the bills tab.

screen shot of the menu drop down


Payments Made

The payments you make on your bills in Zoho Inventory can be viewed by going to the Bills tab. To do so:

Note: These can also be edited or deleted from here.

Clicking on Payment# directly opens the receipt in the Payments Made tab.

screen shot of payments made tab

Details

Once you make an online payment or manually record one in Zoho Inventory, the corresponding receipt will be displayed in the Payments Made tab. The following details will be included:


Options Associated with Bill Payments

screen shot of options in payment receipts

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