Linking bills with purchase order lines

If you create your bill directly from a purchase order, both of these documents are already linked. However, you can also link bills to purchase orders retrospectively, for example, bills that were made from scratch or imported from Xero, QuickBooks, or Expensify. 

This article will show you how to link your bills with purchase order lines and how to unlink them.

1. Linking a bill to a purchase order

Before a bill can be linked to a purchase order, make sure that it's linked to a project. Additionally, bills can only be linked to POs that are connected to the same project.

To link a bill to a purchase order:

1. Go to either of the following views to open the bill linking modal:
   • From the bill detailed view – click the Link to… button and select Purchase order.

   • From the project detailed view – open the Finances tab, scroll down to the Bills section, and click on the value under the Unlinked (PO) column. The Unlinked (PO) column helps keep track of costs that have not yet been linked with any purchase order. If the value of this column is anything other than 0, it means that some project-related bill(s) probably still need to be linked with purchase orders to get an accurate overview of project profitability in the Quoted vs Actual table. 
      

     Note! If you don’t see this column, it means that the project doesn’t have any POs linked to it.

     

2. A linking modal screen will appear, displaying the bill lines on the left and the purchase order lines on the right. You can now start linking the costs to the PO lines:
   • To link the whole bill with a single purchase order line, drag and drop the bill onto the relevant PO line. If linking is successful, the cost document lines become grayed out, with a link icon in front of them.
   • You can also link the bill line by line if a single bill covers various items on the PO. Simply drag and drop the lines one by one to link them with the relevant quote lines.
     
3. If the value of the bill item you’ve linked matches or exceeds the value of the line on the PO, the PO line will be automatically marked as Settled, with the checkbox turned green. You can also manually tick and untick the checkboxes to mark or unmark the PO lines as Settled.
4. Once you’re done with the linking, click the Confirm changes button to finish the linking process. The purchase order status will be automatically set to 'Received/Completed' if the bill fully matches all PO line items and their values, or to 'Partially Settled' if the bill only includes some of the PO line items or if you've modified their total value.

Quote, purchase order, and bill lines must always share the same relationship. To ensure this:

• If the purchase order was created from a quote line and a bill is later linked to that purchase order, the bill will also be automatically linked to the corresponding quote line.
• If a bill row is already linked to a quote line item, but the same bill row is later linked to a purchase order that originates from a different quote line, the system will relink the bill row to that different quote line.

2. Unlinking the bill from a purchase order

To unlink bill lines from the purchase order:

1. From the bill detailed view, open the linking modal by clicking Link to... and selecting Purchase order.
2. Click on the linkage icon on the left side of the bill item.