Who can use this page: Accountants and Staff upload, review and turn documents into bills; Reviewers, Approvers and Viewers can look. Find it under Purchases → Supplier Inbox. On the phone it is the Inbox tab (scan with the camera).

What it does

Drop a supplier invoice — a PDF from email, a photo of a paper bill, a scan — and BareLedger reads it for you: the supplier, invoice number, dates, currency, subtotal, tax and total, and the line items when the reading is good enough. It then checks what it read, shows you the file and the fields side by side, and turns the document into a bill draft with the original file attached. You never retype a supplier invoice; you confirm it.

Bills created this way go through the same review and approval as a bill keyed by hand, and count as a transaction only when they post.

Step by step

  1. Upload. Drag files onto the drop zone or click it — up to 10 files per batch, 15 MB each, PDF or image (PNG, JPG, WEBP, HEIC, TIFF). On the phone, tap Scan with camera, Photos or PDF / file.
  2. Wait a moment. Each file shows Reading… while the text is extracted and checked, then becomes Ready (everything checks out and the supplier was recognised) or Needs review (something to confirm).
  3. Open the document. The file is on the left, the fields on the right. Every field carries a small tag — confirmed, likely or guess — saying how sure the reading is. The Checks list explains, in plain words, anything that blocks the hand-off (red) or merely deserves a glance (amber).
  4. Fix what needs fixing. Pick the supplier (or create it right there with the name and TIN the system read), correct a number or a date, and Save corrections — the checks run again instantly.
  5. Give each line an account (pick one default account for all lines, then adjust exceptions) and a tax rate when the invoice charges VAT, so the bill's totals match the paper.
  6. Create bill. A draft bill is created for the supplier with the reference, dates, currency and lines you confirmed, and a copy of the file is attached to it under the name supplier_invoice-number_date. You land on the bill, ready to Submit for review.

Duplicates and things that are not bills

  • The same file twice is never added twice — the inbox tells you it was already there.
  • The same supplier invoice number as an existing bill is flagged before a second bill can be created. If the paper simply arrived after someone keyed the bill, use Already keyed as a bill? → Link file to bill: the file is attached to that bill and the inbox document is marked done.
  • Not a supplier bill (a quotation, a statement, a receipt already booked as an expense)? Reject it with a short reason. The file stays archived; nothing is posted.

When a document cannot be read

  • Needs review with "No readable text": the scan is too poor, or the file is an image on a server where the OCR tools are not installed yet. Upload a clearer copy, or fill the fields by hand and create the bill anyway.
  • Failed: the server could not process the file (for example OCR tools missing). An administrator fixes the host and you press Re-extract.
  • Re-extract also re-reads a document from scratch, replacing any corrections you saved.

Plan limits

Documents in the inbox are free. A bill counts against your plan's monthly transactions only when it is approved and posted, in the month of its invoice date. When the current month's transactions are already used up, uploads pause and the page shows the same notice as posting does:

  • Free plan — upgrade to Growth.
  • Growth plan — buy Additional transactions (blocks of 100 per month, up to 10 blocks) under Billing → Add-ons, or upgrade to Business.
  • Business plan — unlimited; the notice never appears.

Documents already in the inbox are kept; only the hand-off waits for capacity.

Common mix-ups

  • "The total is right but it says the subtotal doesn't add up." OCR sometimes misreads one figure. Correct the wrong one and save — the check passes as soon as subtotal + tax equals the total.
  • "It picked the wrong supplier." Pick the right one from the Supplier list; the match was by name similarity. Adding the supplier's TIN to the contact makes future matches exact.
  • "Where are the line items?" Lines come from the model reading when it is available; otherwise one line for the subtotal is proposed. Add lines with Add a line before creating the bill if you want detail on the bill.