Approving bills and duplicate detection

1 min readUpdated 16 Aug 2026

Approving a bill is the moment it becomes real: it posts to your ledger as a payable expense, GST included, dated by the invoice date.

What approval sets in motion

  • The expense appears in your Profit & Loss and the payable in You owe on the dashboard.

  • The GST input credit flows into the right return period.

  • When the payment later appears in your bank feed, Reconcile proposes the match against the approved bill — so the expense is never double-counted. See Matching payments to invoices.

Duplicate detection

The Inbox flags documents that look like something you have already processed — same supplier, same amount, same or similar date. This catches the classic cases: a supplier emailing the invoice twice, a statement uploaded after the invoice, or the same receipt photographed and forwarded.

Handling a duplicate flag

  1. Open both documents and compare references — two genuinely different bills can coincidentally match on amount.

  2. If it is a true duplicate, dismiss the document rather than approving it. Dismissed documents are kept, not deleted.

  3. If it is legitimately a second identical charge (a repeating subscription, say), approve it — the flag is advisory.

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