Travel and field purchases charged to the right award
A researcher's conference trip or a field purchase is submitted with the receipt, checked against the award's allowable costs and approved by the principal investigator before it posts.
Smartbills records the award and cost category when the purchase is made, by the person who knows which study the money is for.
Every purchase names the award paying for it
Each request and invoice names the award and cost category it draws on. The commitment is recorded when it's made, weeks before the invoice arrives.
- Award, category and study picked at the point of purchase
- Committed spend counts approved orders as well as invoices
- Period-of-performance dates checked on every request
Support a sponsor audit will accept, with no document hunt
The request, approval, invoice and payment stay linked. Pulling the evidence behind a specific charge takes a search rather than a project.
- Documents and approvals pulled up together
- Kept for as long as your funder requires
- Search by award, supplier, category or date
Why teams switch
Nobody can say which award paid for what.
Six months later, we can't tell which award paid for a piece of equipment.
The person who knows the study picks the award and cost category at the time of purchase. Every charge traces back to the funding behind it.
Every funder report means a week of rebuilding a spreadsheet from invoices before the deadline.
Spend by award and category stays up to date all period, and the report is a query on records that were coded when the money went out.
Instruments and consumables end up in the same bucket, and we sort it out at audit.
Capital equipment and consumables are separated when the purchase is made and stay separate through to the ledger. There's nothing to untangle later.
The products that do the work.
Each product works on its own, and when you run two, the same record carries from the receipt to the ledger entry.
Accounts payable
Accounts payable automation that reads each supplier invoice, codes it and matches it to the purchase order before anyone is asked to approve payment.
Accounting automation
Accounting automation software that codes each transaction and posts the journal entry to your accounting software the day it happens.
Expense management
Capture receipts, categorize expenses and check policy compliance as expenses are submitted.
FAQ
Frequently asked questions
What people ask us before they sign up.
Yes, and it stays current instead of being pulled together at reporting time. The award is recorded at the point of purchase along with the cost category. Every charge is already tied to its award.
It records cost categories, carries them through to the ledger, and lets you hold budgets per award and category. Whether a particular cost is allowable under a given award is still your research finance team's call; Smartbills makes that decision visible and documented without making it for you.
It's separated from consumables at the point of purchase and carried through as its own category. That matters because funders often treat the two differently, and a misclassification is expensive to unwind during an audit.
It covers the purchasing and expense record only: requests, approvals, invoices, payments and the documents behind them. Study data and anything about research participants are outside its scope and belong in the systems designed to hold them.
Yes. They submit from the app with the receipt, pick the award, and the principal investigator approves. The expense posts with the award and cost category, ready for the funder's report.
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Tie spend to the award at the moment of purchase
Code one award's purchases for a month and see the funder report come together from the records.