When a vendor invoice for materials or equipment lands in your inbox, it needs to become a bill in QuickBooks — coded to the right expense account, and usually to the right job. You can type it in by hand, or have it entered automatically the moment the invoice arrives. Here’s both.
Entering a vendor bill manually in QuickBooks Online
- Select + New, then choose Bill under the Vendors column.
- Choose the vendor, and enter the bill date, due date, and invoice/reference number from the PDF.
- Add a line for every item or charge on the invoice — including tax lines — with the correct GL account. If you job cost, assign the customer/job to each line.
- Check that your line items add up to the invoice total before saving.
- Save, and attach the PDF to the bill record so it’s there if you need to reference it later.
Fine for a handful of invoices a week. It stops being fine once you’re keying in dozens of line items a day across multiple vendors, each with its own invoice layout.
Where manual entry breaks down
Every invoice you type in by hand is data that was already typed once, by the vendor. Retyping it costs time and is where mistakes creep in — a line coded to the wrong GL account, a job left off, a typo in a quantity that throws off the total. Scanned or multi-invoice PDFs make it worse, since there’s no clean text to copy from at all.
It also means someone has to sit down and process invoices as a dedicated task, instead of them just being handled.
Importing vendor invoices automatically
Purchasomatic reads invoice emails directly and extracts every line item into a QuickBooks bill — no typing. Here’s the flow:
- Forward (or have vendors email) invoices to your Purchasomatic capture address.
- OCR extracts every line item, including tax lines, and checks that they add up to the invoice total.
- Purchasomatic matches the invoice to a job automatically when a PO or reference number is present, and applies GL accounts from vendor rules you’ve set once.
- Once a vendor has a track record of clean, accurate extractions, Purchasomatic can publish bills straight to QuickBooks without anyone touching them — with the original PDF attached.
You still see and can correct anything before it publishes — the difference is nobody’s manually retyping invoices that were already typed once by the vendor.
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