NEW: Track your supplier invoices easily with Accounts Payable

If you run a carrier, you already know what the last few days of the month tend to look like in the office. Supplier invoices have been coming in for weeks, and by the time you sit down to close everything off, you find yourself trying to remember what arrived, what was agreed, what got approved and how much you owe.

It takes up time you don't really have, and it's the kind of job where small mistakes are easy to make and hard to spot.

Accounts Payable is built to change that. Rather than letting supplier invoices pile up until the end of the month, you record and approve each one as it arrives, and they all sit together in a single place. So by the time you come to close the month, or to send your own invoices out to your customers, the numbers are already in front of you and ready to use.

What Accounts Payable does

Accounts Payable is where you keep the invoices you get from your suppliers, and it gives you a clear way to handle each one from the moment it arrives to the moment it's paid. In practice, that means you can:

• Record an invoice as soon as it comes in, with the supplier, the amounts, the taxes and the original document all kept together, so nothing gets lost on a desk or in an inbox.
• Approve it before anything gets paid, with a record of who signed it off, so payments only go out once someone has actually checked them.
• See where every invoice stands at a glance, whether it's still to be approved, ready to pay or already dealt with, and how much you owe across all your suppliers.
• Keep a clean trail behind each one, including the reason and the person responsible if an invoice is ever cancelled, so you can always account for what happened and why.

Having all of this in one place, rather than spread across inboxes, paper and the odd spreadsheet, is the foundation that everything else rests on.

Know what every job really costs 

The idea is that you record an invoice the moment it arrives instead of letting it pile up. 

When you do, you choose the supplier, and their VAT number and tax address are filled in for you, so you are not retyping the same details every time. You add the invoice number and the dates, including the due date, then enter the cost lines with their unit price, quantity, tax code and discount, and Meight works out the sum, taxes and total as you go. You can attach the original document as well, so it stays with the record and you are never hunting for it later.

Because all of that happens when the invoice lands, your costs are logged as they come in rather than reconstructed at the end of the month. You always know what you've committed to, what a given job has actually cost you, and when each supplier is due to be paid, and that is what tells you whether the rate you ran it at left you any margin.

When the invoice is for subcontracted work, you don't even record it by hand. If you issued that work through a purchase order, you raise the supplier invoice straight from it, and Meight creates it in Accounts Payable with the details already in place. The invoice and the purchase order stay linked from then on, so the work you subcontracted and the bill for it never drift apart.

Because every invoice carries its due date, you can see what's coming up and plan around it instead of being surprised by it. You know what's going out and when, so the end of the month holds no nasty surprises and you can line up your own incoming payments against what you owe.

‍Stay on top of what you owe

Because every supplier invoice sits in the same list, you can always see where each one has got to and how much is still outstanding, without having to ask anyone. Approving an invoice is part of that same flow rather than something that happens off to the side in a phone call or a quick reply. An invoice has to be approved before it can be paid, and Meight keeps a record of who approved it, so you can see not only what has been signed off but who signed it off.

That means you are working from what you actually know rather than what you think you remember. You do not have to ring round to find out whether a payment was agreed, or scroll back through old messages to check an amount, and nothing gets paid unless it has been checked first. In an office where the same person is often handling the planning, the invoicing and half a dozen other things at once, having that kind of clarity over what is owed takes a real weight off the day.

Be ready when someone asks for proof

Inspections and audits have a habit of asking for exactly the document you cannot lay your hands on. With Accounts Payable, everything to do with an invoice is kept together in one place, including the supplier details, the invoice number and dates, the cost lines, the original document you attached and the record of who approved it. If an invoice was ever cancelled, the reason and the person who cancelled it are kept on file as well.

So when someone does ask for proof, you already have it. You can show what was billed, what was agreed, who approved the payment and why anything was voided, without having to dig back through old emails or piece the story together after the event. For carriers working across the EU, where the paperwork requirements are demanding and the questions can arrive at any time, being able to answer in a couple of minutes instead of losing an afternoon to it is worth a great deal.

Why this matters for carriers

None of this is about changing the way you run your business. It is about taking away the friction that builds up around supplier invoices when they are spread across too many places. If you record them as they arrive, approve them with a clear trail behind each one and keep the proof attached, the end-of-month scramble quietly gets smaller every month.

What you are left with is less time spent on paperwork, fewer surprises about what you owe, suppliers who get paid on time and a clean record sitting behind every payment, and all of that adds up to a calmer and more predictable month-end for the whole office.

Accounts Payable is live now in Meight.

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