Supplier invoices arrive as PDFs and get typed in by hand. QTRACA can read them for you: upload the PDF and the invoice is extracted, matched to a purchase order, and offered for review beside that order. Approve it and it becomes a bill.
Nothing becomes a bill without a person approving it. Extraction is a first draft, not a decision.
Where to find it: Orders > Supplier Invoices. There is also a Supplier Invoices button on the Bills list, and a Supplier Invoice panel on each purchase order.
Getting an invoice in
There are two places you can upload a PDF, and they behave differently in one important way.
| Where | What happens |
|---|---|
| Orders > Supplier Invoices, then Upload Supplier Invoice | The invoice is read, then QTRACA looks for the purchase order it belongs to. Use this when you have a stack of invoices and do not know which order each one is for. |
| The Supplier Invoice panel on a purchase order | The invoice is tied to that order the moment you upload it, so the match is exact rather than a guess. Use this when you are already looking at the order the invoice is for. |
Uploading does not navigate you away. You stay where you were, with a short confirmation and a link to the queue.
Suppliers emailing invoices in directly is not available yet — see Invoices by email below.
What is accepted
- PDFs only, and the file is checked by reading its contents rather than trusting the file name or the declared type — both of which can be set to anything.
- Up to 10 MB per document.
- One PDF becomes one invoice record.
The queue and its tabs
The queue has five tabs. Between them they account for every invoice in the system, so nothing you upload can disappear.
| Tab | What is in it |
|---|---|
| Awaiting review | Everything waiting on a person. This is where you work. It opens here by default. |
| In progress | Just uploaded and still being read. Invoices normally pass through in seconds. If one sits here, something has stalled and it is worth telling support. |
| Failed | Could not be read. The original PDF is kept so you can open it and key the bill by hand. |
| Rejected | Dismissed, with the reason and who dismissed it. |
| Approved | Promoted to a bill, with a View bill link. |
The review screen updates itself while an invoice is still being read, so you can open one straight after uploading and watch it resolve rather than reloading the page.
Statuses
| Status | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Received | The document has arrived and is queued. |
| Extracting | Being read. |
| Extracted | The supplier, dates, references, lines and totals have been read off the document. |
| Matched | A purchase order has been identified for it. |
| Needs Review | Something wants a human eye — no confident order match, or a detail worth checking. |
| Approved | Promoted to a bill. The record is now read-only. |
| Rejected | Dismissed — a duplicate, a statement rather than an invoice, or not for you. |
| Failed | The document could not be read. The original is kept so you can look at it and key the bill by hand. |
Matching to a purchase order
Each extracted invoice is compared with your open purchase orders for that supplier, on the same site, and the result is reported as a confidence:
| Confidence | What it means |
|---|---|
| Exact | The invoice names an order and it was found — or you uploaded it from the order itself. |
| Probable | A likely order, worth confirming. This usually means the supplier had exactly one open order, so it is an informed guess rather than a fact. |
| None | No order could be identified. Assign one yourself. |
An invoice with no purchase order cannot be approved. It waits for you to assign one. Promoting it anyway would create a bill with nothing to check against, losing the three-way match between what was ordered, what arrived and what you are being charged.
Two things worth knowing about matching:
- The supplier is matched on an exact name or tax number. "Northgate Grocers Ltd" printed on the invoice will not find a supplier recorded as "Northgate Grocers". When that happens the invoice arrives with no supplier, and the review screen lets you pick the supplier and then the order.
- Only open orders are offered. A draft order is not offered, because it has not been sent to the supplier yet. A closed or cancelled order is refused outright — if the invoice belongs to an order somebody has already closed, reopen it or key the bill by hand.
Reviewing an invoice
Open an invoice from the queue and you get the PDF on one side and what was read off it on the other, set against the purchase order.
The header comparison shows subtotal, tax and total three ways: Invoice, Purchase Order, and the Difference between them. A value the document did not carry reads Not extracted rather than zero — an absent number and a zero mean very different things on an invoice.
The line comparison pairs invoice lines to order lines and groups them three ways:
- Paired lines — matched to an order line, showing invoice quantity and price against the order's and what was actually received.
- Being charged for something not on the order — lines with no counterpart on the order.
- Ordered but not billed — order lines this invoice does not cover, which is normal on a partial delivery.
The line comparison is prepared in the background and appears on its own. If it says it is still being prepared for longer than a moment, Refresh rebuilds it.
Approve, reject, retry, delete
| Action | What it does |
|---|---|
| Approve | Creates a draft bill from the purchase order and links the invoice to it. Needs a purchase order attached. |
| Reject | Dismisses it with a reason, which is kept along with your name and the time. |
| Retry | Reads a failed document again. Offered only where a retry could actually help — a document that failed because it was too long, or because AI features are switched off or out of quota, will fail the same way every time, so Retry is not offered and the reason is shown instead. |
| Change purchase order | Repoints the invoice at a different order. Use it when a Probable match picked the wrong one — the comparison rebuilds against the new order. |
| Delete | Removes the record and its document. Available until the invoice has been approved into a bill — after that it is the audit trail behind a real financial record and cannot be deleted. |
Amounts on the bill always come from the purchase order and the receipt, never from the invoice. What the supplier printed is shown so you can compare it, but it does not set what you owe. The invoice does supply the invoice number and, when it is printed unambiguously, the invoice date.
Duplicates
If the same document arrives twice, the review screen says so and links to the earlier records. It is a warning, not a block — you decide.
The check compares the document itself, so it catches the same file sent twice. A supplier who re-prints or re-generates the invoice produces a different file, which will not be flagged even though it is the same invoice. The comparison against the purchase order is what catches that, so it is worth a look before approving anything that seems familiar.
Invoices by email
Having suppliers email invoices straight into QTRACA is built, but it is not switched on and cannot be turned on from inside the app yet. The upload panel says "Email ingestion isn't available yet".
The reason is deliberate. Uploading is authenticated end to end — QTRACA knows exactly who supplied the document. Email is not: the check on who sent a message relies on the From header, which the sender writes themselves, so it is a filter rather than proof of identity. That trade-off deserves more thought before it is offered as a self-service switch, so for now it is enabled per account by arrangement rather than by a toggle.
If you want it for your account, talk to us. When it is on, each site has its own address, only known senders are accepted, and there are limits on how much can arrive in an hour so that one sender cannot flood your queue. Every emailed invoice still requires human approval before it becomes a bill.
Availability and permissions
- Supplier invoices are part of the orders and finance features. If your account does not use them, the menu item is not there.
- Uploading, approving, rejecting, retrying, changing the order and deleting all need the same permission as entering a bill by hand. If you can create bills, you can work the queue.
- Everyone else on the account can look at the queue and open an invoice, but sees no action buttons — the screen says so rather than showing an empty bar.
- Invoices belong to a site, and you see the sites you are a member of. A purchase order from another site cannot be attached to an invoice.
Things to know
- Extraction is a draft. It transcribes what is printed and does not calculate, correct or reconcile. If the invoice's own total does not equal the sum of its lines, you will see both exactly as printed.
- An ambiguous date is ignored rather than guessed. 03/12/2026 means one thing in New Zealand and another in the United States, so a date that could be read two ways is left off and the bill keeps its own date. This is on purpose: a wrong date on a bill is worse than no date.
- A supplier reference the document does not carry is left empty rather than invented. The same goes for a purchase order reference — it is used only if the document actually quotes one.
- The document is treated as untrusted. Instructions written inside an invoice are transcribed as invoice content, not followed.
- Rejecting is not the same as deleting. A rejected invoice stays on the Rejected tab with its reason. If you rejected one by mistake, delete it and upload it again.
- An order that is already billed can still take another invoice. That is normal for a partial delivery, so it is shown as a warning rather than blocked. Check the comparison before approving a second invoice against the same order.