A cost base that follows the period, not the renewal calendar
Accruals come from deliveries that actually happened, and prepayments are spread over the periods they cover. One month can be compared with the next.
Smartbills records each commitment the day it's approved, through requisitions, purchase orders and card authorizations, and backs every cost with the merchant's receipt.
Committed spend, visible before it's a payable
The forward view a budget needs: what has been requested, what has been approved, and what hasn't reached the ledger as an invoice yet.
- Commitments recorded at approval, ahead of the invoice
- Budget consumption by cost centre and category
- Renewals and notice dates flagged before they pass
Approval controls enforced by the system
Thresholds by amount and category, delegations with an end date, and a hard split between creating a supplier, approving an invoice and releasing a payment.
- Thresholds by amount, category, cost centre and entity
- Segregation of duties enforced in the workflow
- Every approval kept with the approver and a timestamp
Why teams switch
Spend looks controlled until the invoices land.
The budget looks fine all quarter, then three months of orders get invoiced at once and it doesn't.
Requisitions and purchase orders record the commitment on the day it's approved. Budget consumption by cost centre tracks what the business has promised to spend and not only what has been invoiced so far.
Software and service costs keep creeping up, and nobody remembers approving the increase.
Each subscription runs on its own virtual card with its own limit. When the vendor raises the price, the charge is declined rather than renewing quietly, and someone has to decide whether to renew.
A lender or an acquirer asks how spend is controlled, and the honest answer is a spreadsheet and a policy nobody reads.
Approval thresholds, segregation of duties and a supporting document on every entry are built into the system rather than left to habit. You can show the controls working instead of describing them.
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.
FAQ
Frequently asked questions
What people ask us before they sign up.
Commitments. Your BI tool reads the ledger, and the ledger only knows about invoices. It has no source for requisitions, approvals in progress, open purchase orders or renewal dates. Those all sit upstream of the ledger, which is exactly where forecasts go wrong.
It cuts down the evidence gathering, which is most of a fieldwork week. Each entry carries the document it was booked from and the approvals that authorized it, and corrections post as reversals instead of edits. Tracing a reported figure back to its support happens entirely in the system.
No. Smartbills sits in front of your ledger and posts coded entries, with their support attached, into it. Replacing the ledger is a much bigger project, and the ledger is rarely the part that's broken.
Connecting the ledger and mapping the chart of accounts takes a day. What takes real time is agreeing on approval thresholds internally, and that's a conversation among your people rather than a software problem.
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Know your committed spend before the invoices land
Connect one entity and put its committed spend next to what your ledger shows today.