The money-out side lives under Purchases. It mirrors Sales, for your suppliers.
Vendors
Purchases → Vendors. Add suppliers with their name, email and — optionally — their banking details (bank, account number, branch code, account type) so you can pay them by batch file later.
The vendor's paperwork
Editing a vendor shows an Attachments card — the home for the onboarding pack that otherwise lives in a lever-arch file: the stamped bank confirmation letter, VAT registration certificate, CIPC documents, B-BBEE certificate or affidavit, tax clearance, and a letter of good standing (COIDA) for contractors. Two of these earn their keep on specific days: the bank letter is what you check when an email claims the supplier's banking details "changed" (the most common SME fraud in the country), and the VAT certificate is your defence when SARS queries an input claim on their bills.
Certificates lapse, so each attachment takes an optional expiry date — set it on the file's row. A lapsed certificate gets a red expired pill, one inside 30 days shows expires in Nd, and the books review (the dashboard's "things need your attention") raises "attached certificate lapsed or expiring" until you attach the renewal and move the date. Leave the date blank on documents that don't expire — the bank letter, the CIPC docs.
Bills
Purchases → Bills. Record what suppliers invoice you.
- Create a draft bill: choose the vendor, dates, and add expense line items with VAT.
- Approve it — this posts it to your books (DR expense + DR input VAT / CR Accounts Payable).
- Pay it from a bank account (partial or full).
Bill statuses run draft → open → partial → paid, just like invoices.
Buying stock is not an expense
On a bill line you can pick an item instead of typing a description. It fills in the description and, for a stock item, sends the line to your Inventory account — you still enter the quantity and what you actually paid, because that's what sets the cost.
That makes a stock line behave differently from every other bill line: approving the bill debits Inventory (an asset) rather than an expense account. You swapped cash for goods, so nothing hits your Profit & Loss yet.
The cost only becomes Cost of Sales when you issue the invoice that sells those goods. That's what keeps your gross profit honest — and it's why a big stock purchase no longer shows up as a bad month. Service items, and ordinary typed lines, are expensed on approval exactly as before. See Items & stock (Business plan and up).
Ordering before you buy
If you send suppliers an order before the goods arrive, start at Purchases → Purchase orders instead of typing the bill from scratch. Raise the order, then Receive it when the delivery lands — 360books builds the draft bill for you from whatever actually arrived, and you approve it as usual.
The order itself posts nothing and moves no stock. Approving the bill is still the only moment anything happens to your ledger, which is exactly how it worked before purchase orders existed. Short deliveries, part-received orders and a "still on order" report are all covered in Orders, deliveries & credit control (Business plan and up).
Recurring bills
Purchases → Recurring bills. Rent, insurance, medical aid, connectivity, your accountant's retainer — the costs that are identical every month. Set up a template once with the vendor, the lines and the frequency, and generating it creates the next bill.
A fixed-term commitment — a 12-month lease, a year's insurance paid monthly — gets an "Ends on" date: the schedule stops itself after the last run and shows as Ended, instead of quietly drafting bill #13 for a contract that finished.
It always creates a draft. A template may capture the paperwork, but posting a cost to your ledger without a human looking at it is how you pay a supplier twice for a year and find out at the audit. Approving the draft is still a decision, exactly as it is for a bill you typed in yourself.
Approving large purchases
Settings → Approvals & messaging. Switch on Require approval before a large bill can be posted and set a limit. Anyone who can capture bills still can — but one at or above the limit waits for an owner or admin instead of posting.
- The bill sits on the Bills page in a "waiting for your approval" panel, showing the vendor, the amount and who captured it. Nothing has reached your ledger yet.
- An owner or admin approves it (and it posts) or rejects it with a note. A rejected bill refuses to post until it is edited and sent again.
- The limit is enforced in the database, not just the screen, so it holds no matter how the bill is approved.
This is the control that separates capturing a cost from committing to it — useful the moment more than one person touches your purchases.
Bill payments
Purchases → Bill payments. A record of supplier payments, allocated to the bills they settle.
Vendor credits
Purchases → Vendor credits. A credit note from a supplier (a refund or correction). Apply it against an open bill to reduce what you owe.
Pay your suppliers by batch
On Bills, use the payment-file export to download a beneficiary batch file of your outstanding bills (using the banking details on each vendor). Pick your bank next to the button — the file is laid out for that bank's bulk-payment import (FNB, Standard Bank, Absa, Nedbank, Capitec Business, or generic CSV), with missing branch codes auto-filled from each vendor bank's universal branch code. Import it into your online banking to pay everyone at once. Bills without banking details are skipped and reported.
Where it shows up
Everything here feeds your Accounts Payable balance on the dashboard and balance sheet, your input VAT on the VAT201, and your expenses on the Profit & Loss.
Next: Items & stock →