Vendor invoices drafted as QuickBooks bills, then held up against the bills you saved.

Today someone opens a new bill, picks the vendor, copies the bill number and dates off the invoice, and spreads the amount across expense accounts or product lines. On a contractor's books each line also needs a customer or job; on many others, a class. Keying it is fast. Deciding where every dollar belongs is not.

For the test, AI reads copies of invoices your team has already entered and drafts each one as a QuickBooks bill, header, category lines and item lines, with its reason for every choice. Nothing is saved in QuickBooks. Your reviewer puts each draft next to the bill your bookkeeper actually saved and marks what differs.

Category lines or item lines. A QuickBooks Online bill has two tables. Category details takes an account from your chart of accounts; Item details takes a product or service with a quantity and rate, and Intuit's help notes that table may first have to be switched on in your expense settings. Either kind of line can carry a Customer and a Billable box, which is how a job cost or a bill-back rides along to an invoice. The draft uses whichever table your team used for that vendor, so a supplier you track by item never turns quietly into an expense account.

Purchase orders and receiving, done your way. In QuickBooks Online, picking a vendor with open POs lists them beside the bill; adding one pulls its lines into Item details, and a partial delivery is billed by lowering the quantity. The PO closes once every quantity is billed, and Intuit warns that unlinking it later leaves it closed until someone reopens it. A company that set its inventory receiving method to item receipts can't switch back, and from then on the receipt, not the bill, moves quantity on hand. QuickBooks Desktop offers Receive Inventory with Bill or without one; the second makes an item receipt that waits for the vendor's invoice, and every PO field but the memo carries onto the bill. The draft names the PO or receipt it matched and leaves the link itself to a person.

Bill numbers and repeats. QuickBooks Online has a setting, Warn if duplicate bill number is used, in its advanced settings. Desktop's bill preferences have Warn about duplicate bill numbers from same vendor, which fires only when number, vendor and transaction type match exactly; one Desktop user notes that A00025 and a00025, or 00025 and 25, slip past it. So the draft writes the bill no. exactly as printed and also checks your past bills by vendor, amount and date, naming any earlier bill it resembles.

Class and customer on every line. With class tracking on, QuickBooks Online asks whether one class covers the entire transaction or each row gets its own, and it can warn when a transaction has none. Whatever your classes stand for, buildings, crews or departments, the draft follows that setting: one class per bill, or one per line, split the way the invoice reads. A line it can't place goes to your reviewer with the question, never to a catch-all class.

Approvals, and what your reviewer watches. The bill approval workflow in QuickBooks Online can route bills by amount, vendor or location, with up to seven approvers for a set of conditions, and pending bills show an approval status in the Unpaid list. QuickBooks Desktop Enterprise builds approval processes on amount, vendor name and vendor type, though Intuit notes that bills created from an item receipt aren't sent for approval and an admin's own entries skip it. The draft flags each bill your rules would route, those two gaps included. Your reviewer, often the bookkeeper or controller, looks hardest at the account or item picked, the customer and class, and any number that looks like a repeat.

When the drafts meet the success criteria, new vendor invoices get the same treatment for about 30 days.

A person on your team approves, edits or rejects each draft before any bill exists in QuickBooks. Bills get in the way your bookkeeper prefers: keyed from the draft, or loaded with tools QuickBooks already has. Intuit's bill import for QuickBooks Online takes category lines but not item lines and suggests batches of 100 or fewer; Batch Enter Transactions in Desktop Accountant and Enterprise accepts bills and bill credits. Paying bills stays exactly where it is today.