Bills
Bills is the money you pay out — the invoices your subcontractors send you, checked against what they were contracted to charge, then pushed into Xero as draft bills for approval and payment.
It’s the exact mirror of Invoicing. Invoicing is what your customers owe you; Bills is what you owe your suppliers. Same shape, opposite direction.
Bills is being rolled out gradually, and pushing to Xero needs a Xero connection with write access. If you don’t see it, or the push button is disabled, that’s usually why.
Where bills come from
You don’t create a bill here. Each one is a supplier invoice you already brought in through Subcontractor invoices — one imported invoice becomes one bill. This screen is the step after: check it, sign it off, pay it.
Reconcile before you pay
This is the point of the screen, and it’s worth being clear about the two numbers.
| Number | What it is |
|---|---|
| Stated | What the supplier says you owe — the total printed on their invoice |
| Modelled | What their contracted rates say the work should have cost |
The difference between them is the whole game. A supplier who quietly slips a few extra charges onto a month produces a total that looks plausibly high — not obviously wrong, just a bit more than last time. Comparing against contract is what turns that into something you can see.
A bill where stated and modelled differ materially can’t be pushed until the gap is explained. That’s deliberate: it’s the last moment before money leaves, and a variance you haven’t understood is exactly what shouldn’t go through on autopilot.
A bill with no stated total captured at all is also blocked. It has never been reconciled against anything, so there’s nothing to check it against.
Reading a bill
Switch between Bills and Grid, and expand any bill in place to see its charge lines — date, site, stream, container, description, quantity, unit price and amount, exactly as Xero will receive them. Nothing is summarised or blended; a line on screen is a line on the bill.
Each expanded bill also shows what moved against that supplier’s previous invoice. A surcharge that’s crept in appears as its own comparison rather than being buried in a total.
Lines show whether each one has become a job in WastePro, and whether the charge has been coded to an expense account.
Uncoded lines are flagged. A bill with lines that have no expense account can’t be exported or pushed — Xero needs to know what the cost is against.
Signing off and pushing
Mark the billing review complete
A bill has to be signed off before it can go anywhere. This is a permission-gated action — if you can’t see it, your role doesn’t include financial sign-off.
Push, or export
Create draft Bill in Xero creates it as a draft ACCPAY bill in that organisation’s Xero. Nothing is approved and nothing is paid — approval and payment stay in Xero, with your normal controls. There’s also a CSV if you’d rather import it yourself.
Bills already pushed are marked, and a retry skips them rather than sending again.
The double-pay protection. Bills are pushed using the supplier’s own invoice number. If that number already exists in Xero — because you pushed it before, or because someone imported it by hand — the push fails loudly for that bill instead of quietly updating the existing one. Read a failure like that as the system doing its job, not as an error to work around.
Why the amounts look the way they do in Xero
Each line arrives in Xero as a quantity of 1 at the reviewed line amount, with the real quantity and unit price written into the description.
That looks odd until you know why: Xero recalculates quantity × unit price itself, and for rates carried to fractions of a cent — per-tonne charges especially — that recalculation drifts a few cents from the total you reviewed. Posting the reviewed amount directly means the bill in Xero is always exactly the bill you signed off.
Next: Receivables is the other side of the ledger — what your customers still owe you.