Receipts vs bills

HQ captures expenses on two rails, and both live under Ledger › Expenses in one Bills and Receipts list:

• A Bill is an obligation to pay. It sits in Accounts Payable until you match it to the bank transaction that pays it.
• A Receipt is proof of a payment you've already made. It posts the expense straight away: there's no AP to clear.

Each row shows a Bill or Receipt badge, and the segmented All · Bills · Receipts · Unpaid filter narrows the list ("Unpaid" is your open-AP lens). Approved bills show a purple Match pill; a receipt shows Post, Paid from or Match, depending on what it still needs. Reach for a Bill when the money is still owed, and a Receipt when it's already out the door. A receipt dated before your books start in HQ and paid after it asks whether it was already owed on your start date before it is recorded.

A till receipt that arrives by email files itself as a receipt. The slip a restaurant, a cafe or a corner shop hands you carries a tender section under its total: the card it was paid with, any tip you added, and the amount the card was actually charged. When such a document comes in through your connected mailbox, HQ reads that section and files it as a Receipt, because the money has already moved. It does that even when nothing else on the slip says so, which is usual: a till receipt rarely carries a PAID stamp, states no balance due, and often titles itself something like "Eat In Order".

Filing itself as a receipt is something HQ does for what it picks up from your email. A photo or a PDF you upload yourself is filed the way you file it, using the Bill or Receipt choice on the upload, and that answer always wins: HQ will not move an uploaded document onto the other rail behind your back. The figures below are read the same way whichever door a document comes in by, so they apply to an email, to an upload, and to the Re-extract line items button. Either way, if a document lands on the wrong rail, click its badge to switch it.

One limit, and it is deliberate. All of this happens while a document is still waiting for you in Bills and Receipts. Once you have approved a document, it has an entry in your books, so HQ will not go back and change its figures: re-extracting an approved document only recovers the list of items on it, and leaves the total and the tax exactly as you approved them.

On a till receipt, the total HQ stores is the meal, not the tip. A till receipt prints two totals: the bill itself, and below it what the card was actually charged once you added a gratuity. HQ records the first one, so the subtotal, the tax and the total on the row add up to each other and the receipt reconciles. The tip is not lost. The card line in your bank feed is bigger than the receipt by exactly that tip, so HQ offers you the two together as a suggested match, and when you confirm it the difference posts to the same expense account, dated the day the card was charged. The expense then adds up to the full amount you paid, in two pieces that each say what they are. Nothing posts until you confirm. That pairing is offered on a slip filed as a Receipt, which is what a till receipt is; if you filed one as a Bill instead, click its badge to switch it, or pick the card line yourself when you match it.

A BC receipt that prints one tax figure gets split into GST and PST, when the items prove it. A till receipt usually shows a single "Total Tax" line with no breakdown, and the whole of it used to be filed as GST, which claims back more input tax credit than you are owed. On a book whose province is British Columbia, HQ now works out how much of that figure is GST at the federal rate on what was taxed, treats the rest as PST, and then checks that answer against the items on the slip: if some of them carry exactly that much PST at the provincial rate, the split is used. On a $44.75 lunch with $2.79 of tax, that is $2.24 of GST plus $0.55 of PST on two bottled drinks, which is the BC tax on sweetened drinks. The PST is not recoverable, so it becomes part of the expense, and only the GST reaches your input tax credits.

If the items cannot prove the split, HQ changes nothing at all and tells you instead: the receipt keeps the figures it arrived with, and a card in Ledger › Health names those receipts by supplier, date and amount, so you can open each one and split its tax yourself against the slip. A tax figure only a few cents above the GST rate is treated as rounding, not as provincial tax, so an ordinary GST-only bill never appears there.

The split applies to receipts captured from now on, through any door: email, upload, or Re-extract line items on a document still waiting for you. Anything already approved keeps the figures it was recorded with, because changing tax on a document that has already posted would move numbers you may have filed on.

Tell HQ which account paid a receipt. A receipt only posts once HQ knows where the money came from. Until it does, the row sits at Awaiting bank match and shows a Paid from pill. Click it and the book's bank and card accounts drop down right there: pick the one that paid, and the expense posts immediately. The receipt still clears itself later, when the matching bank line comes in. If a person paid it out of their own pocket, set them in the row's Business dropdown instead, and the pill becomes Post. Opened in its preview, a receipt waiting this way that already names who paid it (or the account) carries Approve, which posts it the same way.

Switch a Bill to a Receipt, or the other way. Filed something on the wrong rail? Once it's approved, click its Bill or Receipt badge to switch it to the other type. Switching a Bill to a Receipt moves it out of Accounts Payable (it records as already paid); switching a Receipt to a Bill puts it into Accounts Payable as an unpaid bill you can match to a bank payment (one you recorded as paid in cash or personally stays paid that way). This is a real accounting change, not just a relabel: HQ reverses the old journal entry and re-posts it on the other rail. If the document is already matched to a bank transaction, Unmatch it first, then switch. A bill that carries entries a receipt can't hold (an exchange gain or loss, a holdback, or a vendor credit applied to it) stays a bill: keep it as a bill and record the payment against it. So does a bill you marked as still owed at your start date, because its balance is part of your opening balances. A foreign-currency bill that was restated at the Bank of Canada rate switches normally.

Match a receipt to its bank transaction by hand. HQ matches receipts to your bank feed automatically: when new bank lines come in, and when you press Run Matching at the top of Bills and Receipts, which matches receipts first and then bills, and says how many of each it matched. A receipt in another currency is converted at the Bank of Canada rate for the receipt's date. Its bank line may be up to $1.00 off that, either way. Because your card adds its own exchange charge on top, a line up to 4% higher also matches when the line's description carries the supplier's name, or the word that identifies them: a DigitalOcean LLC receipt matches a line reading DIGITALOCEAN.COM. Words like Inc, Canada, Store or Services never count on their own. When two transactions could both be the same receipt, HQ leaves the choice to you. If HQ misses one, click the receipt's Match pill and pick the transaction yourself. For a receipt that has already posted this reconciles it to the bank line; for a foreign-currency receipt still waiting on its bank line, matching is what posts it, at the amount your bank actually charged: the expense at the Bank of Canada rate, and the card's exchange charge on Foreign Transaction & Card FX Fees (5055).

If the picker opens on a month with nothing in it, HQ widens the search to every month and says so above the list. That usually means the receipt's own date is wrong: a numeric date read the other way round can land months from the day the card was actually charged. Match it to the right transaction, then fix the receipt's date too, or the expense stays in the wrong month and its GST on the wrong return.

Once a receipt is matched against a bank transaction it shows a grey Unmatch pill. If you matched it to the wrong line, click Unmatch to reverse it: the receipt returns to its unmatched state and the bank transaction is freed to match something else.

If you already categorized the bank line. Matching a receipt to a transaction you had already coded attaches the receipt as proof and posts nothing. The expense is already in your books from that line's own category, so posting it again would count it twice. The receipt still moves to Matched and still offers Unmatch; the bank line keeps its category and stays where it is on Banking. Once a transaction has a receipt attached it stops appearing in the picker, because a transaction can only hold one. An attached receipt offers no Paid from choice or Approve in its preview, and can't be marked as paid by a person: the line already records how it was paid. To record it differently, Unmatch it first.

If the receipt had already posted when you approved it, the bank line's own entry is the one that goes: the receipt's entry splits the tax out properly, and keeping both would count the purchase twice. When the charge is bigger than the receipt (usually a tip), the difference posts to the receipt's expense account, the same as when a receipt clears a line that had no category, so your bank account still shows the whole charge.

Two kinds of bank line refuse a receipt, and say why. A line in another currency, such as one from a US-dollar bank or card account, takes a receipt only as proof, and only once the line has a category. A receipt in another currency that is still waiting for its bank line shows a Match pill: click it, set Amount to All (the list compares amounts in your book's currency, and the line shows its own), and pick the line. The receipt is attached and nothing posts, as above, and the line stops being asked for a receipt. Before the line has a category, or when the receipt has already posted, it is refused, because the receipt is recorded in your book's currency and the line is not. HQ never attaches one to such a line on its own. And a line another match already paid off, such as a repayment to a person or a paid bill, can't take a receipt that has already posted, because the charge would then be in your books twice. If a bill paid the line, the bill already records the purchase: when the receipt is the same purchase, discard the receipt and keep the bill. For any other match, undo it first if the receipt really belongs to this line.