Most businesses these days email their invoices in a PDF format. It is just the modern way and not many of my clients these days send out paper copies of invoices. So when you receive an invoice from a supplier as a PDF how do you add it to your Xero accounts?
When you click on the ? you can copy a new email address which is unique to your company. Xero advise that you keep this email address private and don't share this outside of your organisation. Copy this address and create a new contact in your email package called Xero Email to Bills.
When you receive a new PDF invoice via email you can forward this email to this private email address, but one tip I have found is make sure you only leave the PDF invoice attached to the Email.
One of my suppliers includes multiple documents with the invoice and Xero tried to convert them all to Bills when really there was only one bill I needed. Strip out the extra attachments before sending this email. The bills must be an email attachment, and not embedded in the body of the email.
Once the email is sent wait a few minutes and then click on the draft tab in Bills and you will see the bills appear with a comment after the name of the company saying 'forwarded bill' so you can identify which bills you have uploaded this way.
When you edit the bill you will find that some of the fields have been filled out for you and these are marked with a lightening bolt, so you can just add the rest of the information or edit anything which has been put in incorrectly.
This is like a simplified version of Hubdoc, but one where Xero intelligently fills out some of the information for you and attaches the bill to the transaction in Xero!
I would say that if you find you have a high volume of bills to import, you may be better looking at using Hubdoc which is a more sophisticated version of this functionality. You can have a free Hubdoc subscription if you already pay for a Xero Business edition.
If anything I've written here resonates with you, call me on 01604 420057 and let's see how we can help you.