Raising Manual Bills

Similar to how invoices are generated, bills can be added to Xero and then synchronized to LoftyWorks. The most frequent bills submitted by letting agents are for rent, payments to the landlord, and fees to be deposited into the client's office account. Although Management Fees and landlord bills can be generated through LoftyWorks, the majority of invoices will be raised manually in Xero. Later in this guide, these topics will be discussed. You must choose Business, then Bills to Pay, from the menu options in the top left-hand corner of the screen in order to raise a bill in Xero.

An option labelled New Bill will then appear on the screen with a drop-down arrow next to it. If you want a bill to be raised automatically on a regular basis, either click where it says New Bill or select the drop down to examine alternative options like generating a repeating bill.

The template bill format will then be displayed by Xero, where you may enter the information you need to appear on your bill. Each input element's instructions are shown in the diagram below.

If you navigate back to the Bills to Pay screen, you will be presented with a list of all bills raised. There are also options to view the bills based on their status. I.e. Draft, Awaiting Approval, Awaiting Payment, Paid and Repeating.

For the purposes of using LoftyWorks, it is crucial to remember that you must always select "Save & submit for approval" when you are saving a bill. All bills are like this. In order for the bill to have the status "Awaiting Approval," this is necessary. This is essential so that we can distinguish between the bills that have been added but are still unpaid and the bills for which funds has since been received.

• Awaiting Approval – Bill has been added but money has not been received.
• Awaiting Payment – Bill has been added and we have received money, but it has yet to be paid.
• Paid – Bill has been added, money has been allocated to it and it has been paid out of the account.

When you go through the Pay Out section on LoftyWorks (which is discussed later in the guide), you will assign cash to the bill, which will alter the status of the bill in Xero from "Awaiting Approval" to "Awaiting Payment." This is how we identify which bills are ready to be paid in Xero so that it is an automatic procedure rather than manually checking each bill.

As shown in the screenshot below, when you are satisfied with the details added to the bill, click the arrow next to save.

In the next screenshot, the next step is to press Save & submit for approval. This will then set up the bill correctly in LoftyWorks.

There is also a search tool where you may look up a bill or invoices based on different criteria such as amount, reference, and contact if you are looking for a specific bill or want to narrow down the list of bills further.

The bill can then be viewed on LoftyWorks by going to the relevant property and clicking the Expenses tab. Any bills you generate for that property will be saved under this section, and you will be able to also view them in Xero.

The Bill will now be reflected when you run a landlord statement if it falls within the dates you specified. For example, the statement below reveals that the bill of £108 is classified as property expenses.