Approve a bill

New bills land in Pending until you approve them. Approving posts the bill to Accounts Payable so it's ready to be paid and matched.

1. Go to Ledger › Expenses.
2. Find the bill in the Pending section.
3. Click its green Approve pill.

The bill moves to the Approved section. Only then does its purple Match pill appear, so you can reconcile it against a bank transaction.

You can also approve a bill from the email it came in on: open the email in Mail and click its In Books pill. When the bill needs nothing more than your yes, the panel that opens offers Approve; otherwise it says why and offers Full review, this same review screen, without leaving Mail. See "Turn an emailed bill into an expense".

If a bill shows an amber Review pill instead, its extracted line items don't reconcile to the total. Click Review, confirm or correct the tax, then approve it from the panel. If the document only ever showed one number, use Only have the total? Work out the tax (under the Total) to fill the subtotal and tax from the total.

Some documents never add up: a supplier prints no breakdown, or a line is unreadable. When the total and the GST/HST are right, click Looks right — confirm tax. That answer is saved, so the bill stops asking and the amber pill clears. Change any of the amounts afterwards and it asks once more, because the numbers you confirmed are no longer the numbers on the bill.

Editing a bill's details, and saving them

Open a bill and click Edit Data to expose its fields (a pending or low-confidence bill opens with them already showing). The Save button sits at the top of the panel, in the same row as Edit Data and Approve, so it stays in view no matter how far down the fields you scroll.

Watch that button: as soon as you change anything it turns amber and reads Save changes. That is your signal that what you typed is not in the books yet. Closing the panel while it reads Save changes throws the edit away. After a successful save it settles back to a plain Save.

If the currency shows in amber with a question mark

A newly imported bill shows its currency in amber with a question mark, like USD?, when TALISK_HQ read that currency off the document but nobody has confirmed it. It stays amber until you say the guess is right, because the currency decides what the bill is converted from.

Two ways to answer it:

• On the row, click the amber currency and pick one. Picking the same currency again counts: the list dropdown confirms whatever you choose.
• In the bill's preview, tick USD is correct under the Currency field and save. If you change the currency instead, that choice confirms it on its own and the tick is filled in for you.

Either way the amber question mark clears and TALISK_HQ offers to remember the currency for that supplier.

Correcting the currency works even after the bill is approved or matched to a bank line: the books follow the correction on their own. The bill's entry, and the payment behind a matched bill, are re-posted at the corrected value in the same save, so you never need to unmatch first or fix anything downstream. If the entries cannot follow (for example the bill sits in a locked period), the save is refused whole and nothing changes.

If TALISK_HQ asks you to check the date

Some suppliers print a date as numbers only, like 05/06/2026. That reads two ways: 5 June in most of the world, 5 May in the United States. TALISK_HQ works out which one the document means from the document itself (a month spelled out somewhere on it, another date whose day is past the 12th, where the supplier is), and when nothing on the page settles it, it says so instead of picking one quietly.

Canadian suppliers are the ones you will be asked about most, and that is not a gap in what TALISK_HQ can read. Canada genuinely uses both orders: a receipt from a shop in British Columbia may print the day first or the month first, and the address settles nothing either way. Where a United States ZIP code or a British address would decide it, a Canadian one cannot, so TALISK_HQ asks.

TALISK_HQ also asks when the two readings disagree about something it can check. If the document arrived by email on 4 September and its printed date reads either 9 April or 4 September, the second reading is the day the document reached you and the first is five months earlier. TALISK_HQ does not choose; it flags the date and shows you what was printed.

Payment terms printed on the document count as evidence. A bill dated 10/05/2026, due 10/06/2026, on terms of 1 Day can only be 5 October: read the other way, the due date would be a month later, not a day.

When the order is still unsettled you will see a short amber note under the Date field quoting what the document printed and asking which date it is, with a button for each reading (for example 5 Oct 2026 and 10 May 2026). The reading nearer the bill's payment date, or failing that the day its email arrived, comes first, and the note says so. Pick one and save; picking it is the confirmation. You can also type a different date, which confirms it on its own.

If the printed date does not split into two readings (it was flagged for another reason), you get a This date is correct tick instead: tick it and save, or type the right date.

It matters more than it looks. A swapped day and month is still a perfectly believable date, so nothing further down the line can catch it, and if it lands either side of a month or quarter end it moves the bill's GST onto the wrong return.

A bill with an unconfirmed date is never approved automatically, even when it matches one of your recurring supplier rules. It waits in Pending for you.

If a bill is in the Low Confidence section

Sometimes TALISK_HQ isn't sure a scanned document is really a bill: a document it couldn't clearly identify, or one you scanned by hand from an email it had marked "not a bill". It holds those in the yellow Low Confidence section at the bottom of Ledger › Expenses instead of Pending, so they don't clutter your review queue. Each one carries a yellow Low confidence pill.

Open the bill to check the vendor, amount, and tax (the fields are already exposed) and correct anything that's wrong. Then click Move to Pending to send it to your normal Pending queue, and approve it from there. A bill has to be in Pending before it can be approved, so a low-confidence bill offers no Approve button of its own.

A low-confidence receipt is different: you can click Approve right there in its preview, and once you've opened it at least once an Approve button also appears on its row, so you can approve it in one tap from the list. It only appears after you've looked at the receipt, so you never approve one sight unseen.

If TALISK_HQ says the document is a proforma

A proforma is a supplier's quote, usually asking for a deposit before they ship. It is not something you owe, so approving one would record a payable that does not exist. When an emailed or uploaded document calls itself a proforma (the word "proforma" or "pro forma" printed on it), TALISK_HQ marks the bill as one, and Approve stops to ask before booking anything. A receipt photographed with the phone's receipt scanner is not checked for this. Cancel, then click This is a proforma in the bill's preview: that files it under Ledger › Expenses › Proformas and takes it out of your payables. You can record deposits against it there, and apply them to the real invoice when it arrives. See "Proformas and supplier deposits".

Reading the document can get this wrong. If it really is an invoice you owe, choose It's a real bill, approve it in that question: TALISK_HQ posts it and files it as a standard bill from then on. The phone asks the same question when you tap Approve. On the desktop you can also change the bill's Type in the preview before approving. Once a bill has posted, its type can no longer be changed.

A bill marked as a proforma is never approved automatically, even when it matches one of your recurring supplier rules. It waits in Pending for you.