Payables Module
Tracking What You Owe Vendors
A live view of every outstanding Purchases order, with its due date worked out for you, and the one action you can take from here — recording a payment against one.
Start here
1Before you start
Payables doesn’t keep its own bills. It’s a real-time view over Purchases’ own order list, filtered down to whatever counts as a real obligation — Approved, Received, or Billed. A Draft order in Purchases isn’t a payable yet.
Without orders in Purchases reaching at least Approved, this screen has nothing to show. Go create purchase orders in Purchases first — see that module’s own guide.
Purchases doesn’t store a due date on an order directly — Payables works one out for you from the order’s Purchase Date and its Payment Terms text (recognizing things like “Net 30” or “Due on Receipt”). If the Payment Terms text can’t be parsed into a number of days, no due date is shown and that order can never be flagged Overdue here.
If the company is set to cash-basis reporting, Payables (and Receivables) don’t appear in navigation at all — a cash-basis company only recognizes money once it actually moves, and an unpaid bill is, by definition, money that hasn’t moved yet.
2Record a payment
Click Record Payment on any open item. This is a direct pass-through to the same payment action available on the order itself in Purchases — you’ll need an amount (can’t exceed the outstanding balance) and a real bank account to pay it from. It creates a real outflow transaction in Banking and updates the underlying order’s balance — once that balance hits zero, the item drops off this list.
Common tasks
Paying a bill before it’s been billed
An order can show up here as a real obligation before your books have actually recognized the expense for it.
Purchases only posts the GL expense journal once an order reaches Billed — but Payables already counts an order as owed once it’s merely Approved. That means you can see (and even pay down) a payable here for an order that’s still sitting at Approved or Received in Purchases, ahead of the actual expense hitting your ledger. This is intentional — a confirmed order is a real commitment to pay, regardless of exactly when the vendor’s bill lands.
Recording a partial payment
Enter just the amount actually paid. The balance carries the remainder forward and the item stays on this list — you can record another payment later against the same order for whatever’s left, as many times as needed until it’s fully paid.
Reference
Payable statuses
| Status | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Open | Open Owed, not yet past its worked-out due date. |
| Overdue | Overdue Past its worked-out due date, still unpaid. |
| Paid | Paid Balance reached zero — drops off the open list. |
Unlike Receivables (which trusts a status set by hand on the Sales invoice), this status is recalculated fresh from the real balance and the derived due date each time the Payables list loads — there’s no separate “Overdue” flag to remember to set.
What this module doesn’t do
If an order’s Payment Terms field is blank, or contains text this module can’t parse into a number of days, no due date is calculated — that order will show as Open indefinitely and can never be flagged Overdue, no matter how old it gets.
You can’t create a payable, edit its amount, or change its vendor from this screen — all of that happens on the order itself in Purchases. Recording a payment is the only write action available.