Expenses & bills

Watch the 2 lessons: Capture a receipt as an expense (2:01), Record a supplier bill and pay it (2:27).

Ten tabs covering every way money leaves the business — starting with an inbox you can email paperwork to, and ending with an approval queue over the top of all of it.

Plan.

Expenses & bills is included from Starter upwards.

The tabs

Inbox is first because it is the start of the work: documents flow out of it into Expenses and Bills. It carries a count, and so do Bills, Purchase Orders and Approvals, because a queue nobody can see is a queue nobody empties.
Tab	What belongs here
Inbox	Paperwork that has arrived but nobody has filed — a bulk upload, or an invoice emailed to your company's Ledgr address
Expenses	Card and cash spend, usually with a receipt attached
Bills	Supplier invoices you owe, with a due date. The count is what is overdue
Purchase Orders	What you have committed to buy, and receiving against it. The count is what is still open
Supplier balances	Aged creditors oldest first, a statement per supplier, and reconciling one against your own records
Mileage	Business trips claimed at the SARS rate
Per Diem	Daily subsistence allowances
Petty Cash	The float and what came out of it
Categories	Your expense categories, their budgets, and the category Ledgr has learned for each supplier
Approvals	Everything waiting for sign-off. The count is what is pending

The document inbox

Paperwork does not arrive when you are sitting at Ledgr with the file in front of you. A supplier invoice lands in an email while nobody is thinking about bookkeeping; a month of receipts gets dealt with in one sitting on the 25th. The inbox is where both of those wait.

Get the documents in
Add documents takes several files at once. Or use your email-in address, shown on the same tab: forward a supplier's invoice there, or give the address to the supplier so their invoices arrive by themselves. Each of your companies has its own address, so a group's paperwork lands in the right set of books.
Let it read itself
Each document is read in the background — you do not wait for it. The row shows whether it was uploaded or emailed, how many pages it has, and moves from pending through reading to ready.
File it
File it opens the document beside what was read off it — supplier, date, total, VAT — and you turn it into an expense or a bill. Try again re-reads one that came back badly; Discard removes something that was never paperwork.

Anyone with that address can send to it.

That is deliberate — forwarding has to work from a director's phone, a bookkeeper's client and a supplier's billing system, and a list of approved senders would silently drop the ones it had never seen. What arrives is not a transaction: it is a document in a queue that somebody reviews. Treat the address like a key and ask for a new one if it gets out.

What Ledgr can read, and how well

A digital PDF is not recognised — it is read. An emailed supplier invoice carries the characters the supplier's own system wrote, so Ledgr takes them exactly, with no recognition step and therefore no recognition error. The document says read from the PDF rather than a confidence score, and those are different claims.
A photograph or a scan is recognised, and every field carries a confidence score. Low ones are worth a glance — the total and the VAT especially.
A page is checked against itself. Where two of subtotal, VAT and total agree at the statutory rate to the cent, they corroborate each other and a misread third figure is repaired. Where they do not, the figure is reported rather than rewritten.
Several receipts photographed on one page are split apart — but only when the whitespace says so and every piece independently reads as a whole document with a labelled total. If it gets that wrong, Not separate documents on any of the pieces puts the page back as it was.
Multi-page documents are handled: a PDF, a multi-page TIFF from an office scanner, or a bank statement of twenty pages.

A bank statement forwarded here imports itself.

Ledgr recognises a bank statement as a bank statement rather than filing it as a supplier invoice, and takes it through to Banking instead. Ask your bank to email your monthly statement to this address.

Ledgr remembers how you filed a supplier.

The dictionary knows Engen sells fuel. It cannot know that your business books Makro to Consumables while the shop down the road books it to Stock. So the category you choose is remembered against that supplier — by their VAT registration number first, which is why every branch of a chain counts as one supplier — and offered next time, with how many times you have done it that way. Accepting a suggestion teaches it just as changing one does; changing it starts the count again, because "filed to Fuel the last six times" must not be said about a supplier whose last five went elsewhere.

What is deliberately not remembered is the VAT rate. A garage sells zero-rated fuel and standard-rated pies, the document states its own VAT, and Ledgr checks that statement against the arithmetic — a remembered rate would override a figure that was read and checked with one that was merely habitual, on a VAT201.

Capture a receipt

Expenses → Capture Receipt
On a phone or tablet this opens the camera. On desktop, upload a photo or PDF.
Let the scan run
Ledgr reads the slip and fills in supplier, date, total, VAT and a suggested category.
Check the confidence scores
Each extracted field shows how sure the scanner is. Anything low is worth a glance — the total and the VAT especially.
Correct and save
Fix what is wrong, confirm the category, save. The image stays attached to the expense as your supporting document.

Two fields on that form are worth knowing about because they are what make the spend reportable later:

Cost centre, if you have any. Tagging spend to a branch, a department or a project is what puts it in the right column of the departmental income statement. The field is hidden entirely if you have not set any up, so a single-location business is never asked which branch it is.
The job, if the spend belongs to one. Allocating an expense or a supplier bill to a job card puts the real document's cost against that job — so the job's margin is measured against what you actually paid rather than against a figure somebody re-typed. Correct it on the purchase, not on the job.

Camera capture is a mobile feature.

On desktop and web you upload an existing image or PDF instead. The reading step is the same either way.

Ledgr tells you when it has seen a document before.

Every scan is fingerprinted, so the same file scanned twice is recognised — a Scanned before notice appears on the capture form and says what the first one became: an expense, a supplier bill, or nothing yet if that scan was never saved. It is an exact match on the file, so it never fires on two genuinely different receipts from the same shop on the same day, and the warning does not stop you: a supplier sometimes really does email the same invoice twice for two different jobs. The check is across your whole business rather than per company, because capturing one invoice under two entities is the same mistake.

Capturing a purchase twice is how it gets paid twice, so this is worth reading rather than dismissing. There is a second, looser check when you save a supplier bill: the same supplier with the same invoice number is refused outright, and Ledgr names the bill that already exists with its date, amount and status.

Supplier bills

A bill is money you owe on terms, so it is tracked separately from card spend. Capture the supplier, the bill date, the due date, the lines and the VAT. Bills feed the payables side of the dashboard and appear in the cash flow forecast; mark one paid when you settle it, or match it against the bank transaction in Banking.

Purchase orders

A purchase order is what you have committed to buy before the invoice exists. The tab shows your open commitments — useful on its own for a cash-flow forecast — and is where you receive against an order as the goods arrive, part-delivery by part-delivery.

Receiving is what turns a commitment into stock and a liability. When the supplier's invoice then arrives, attaching it to the order lets Ledgr compare all three — what you ordered, what you received and what you were billed — line by line rather than only on the total. An invoice that arrives by email days after the lorry can still be attached to its order, which is the ordinary case in any business whose paperwork does not travel with the goods.

Larger buying operations — requisitions, approval routing, RFQs, approved vendors and contracts — live on the Procurement screen on the Manufacturing plan. This tab is the part every business needs.

Suppliers

The creditors' side of the same coin as aged debtors: what you owe, in ageing buckets, oldest first. It ties to the creditors control account in the ledger, and the report says whether it does — a supplier ageing that does not agree with the balance sheet is worse than none, because every figure on it looks reasonable.

Open a supplier for their statement, and reconcile it against the statement they sent you. Where the two disagree it is usually an invoice you have not captured or a payment they have not allocated, and both are easier to settle in the month they happened.

Per diem

A daily subsistence allowance for somebody travelling for work: the dates, the destination, the rate and the number of days. It goes through the same submit → approve → pay states as any other claim, and each of those is a real step — a claim cannot be marked paid without having been approved by somebody who holds the approve permission.

The rate is one your business sets. Somebody who approves expenses adds them under Per Diem → Your per-diem rates — a name such as “Overnight, local” and the daily amount you pay — and a claim is raised at one of them. Until a rate is set, the claim form says so rather than suggesting one. A claim keeps the rate it was raised at, so changing a rate later does not change claims already made. SARS’s daily amount for local travel is shown beside your rates for reference: an allowance above it is taxable in the employee’s hands.

No input VAT is claimed on it, and that is correct rather than an omission: a subsistence allowance is not a supply made to the business and carries no tax invoice.

Petty cash

The tin. Record the float when you put cash in, then a slip for each thing that comes out of it, and the tab shows the balance that should physically be there. Count it against that figure now and again — that is the whole control.

Slips post to the category you choose, against the petty cash account, so the tin appears on the balance sheet as the asset it is. A slip claims no input VAT: there is no rate on a till slip Ledgr could stand behind on a return.

Mileage

Expenses → Mileage → Log New Trip
Record the trip
Date, from, to, purpose and kilometres. If the trip was for a customer, pick them under Customer: the trip log then shows who it was for, so you know whom to recharge the travel to. The claim itself is still reimbursed to whoever drove.
The claim is calculated
At the SARS prescribed rate — R4.95 per kilometre for 2026/27. The trip log is the record you would produce if the claim were ever questioned, so keep the purpose specific.

Categories, budgets and rules

On the Categories tab you set a monthly budget per category and watch actual spend track against it — the bar runs green, then amber, then red.

Below that, Learned from how you file lists every supplier Ledgr has learned a category for — the suggestion the capture form makes the next time one of their documents arrives, with how many times in a row you filed it that way. Nothing is typed in to make a rule: filing a document is what teaches it, and changing the category teaches it the new answer. Forget removes one you no longer want suggested.

Approvals

Claims raised by someone without approval rights land in the Approvals queue rather than posting straight to the ledger. An approver sees the claim, the attachment and the category, and either approves it — at which point it posts — or rejects it with a reason that goes back to the person who raised it.

Who can approve is set in Roles & users: the approve permission on the expenses module. Approving is not a field somebody can write — the claim records who approved it and when, and that is what an invoice raised on the back of it rests on. A claim approved before Ledgr started recording approvers says so in those words rather than showing a blank where a name should be.

Approval limits. An owner or an admin can say how much a role, or one person, may approve — for example a bookkeeper up to R5 000 — on the Approvals tab, under Approval limits. Above their limit a person’s approval does not count: pressing Approve says so, and a bill they capture is saved but waits for someone whose limit covers it, or for the owner, who has no limit. A person’s own limit takes the place of their role’s. Purchase requisitions keep their own approval steps.

An approved claim is an accrual and a paid one is cash, so both reach the general ledger and neither can be quietly restated afterwards: once a claim has been paid, its amount is fixed. Correcting one means reopening it first, which is a step somebody can see.

A note on VAT

Input VAT is only claimable where you hold a valid tax invoice from a VAT-registered supplier. Capture the VAT amount separately rather than folding it into the total, or the VAT201 will understate your input claim.

Common problems

What you see	What to do
"Scanned before — This exact file was scanned on … and saved as …"	Ledgr recognised the same file and says what the first scan became. Open that record rather than capturing a second one — see above.
A supplier bill is refused as already captured	The same supplier and the same invoice number already exist. Ledgr names the bill; open it. If the supplier genuinely reused a number, change one of them.
A claim or bill will not save, and Ledgr names a date	A document dated more than a year ahead is refused, and so is a due date that falls before its own issue date — both would put a journal in a period no close will ever reach. Correct the date.
A paid claim or bill will not let you change the amount	Money has already been recorded against it. Reducing the amount would leave cash in the ledger with nothing behind it. Press Reopen on it first — that undoes the payment posting — then edit, then pay again. Notes and purposes stay editable throughout.
Someone approved their own claim, or a status jumped	That cannot happen: a claim's status moves only through submit, approve, reject and pay, and approving needs the approve permission rather than edit. Check the role under roles & users.
A category shows spend against no budget	That is correct — it reads "No budget set" rather than inventing one. Set a budget on the Categories tab if you want the bar.
A recurring bill is on the payables list but not in the ledger	An occurrence posts in the same step it is created, so this only affects older bills. Open and re-save the bill to post it.
An emailed document never arrived in the inbox	Check the address is the one on Expenses → Inbox for that company — each company has its own — and that the document was an attachment rather than an image pasted into the message body. An inline image is treated as a signature or a logo, not a receipt.