What is this page about: How to get vendor bills into Light through file upload, email forwarding, manual entry, and CSV import, what each bill field means, and what happens to a bill after it's entered. Written for both employees entering bills and finance teams checking the data.
On this page
- Three ways to bring a bill into Light
- Completing a bill manually
- What each field means
- Duplicate detection
- What happens after the Inbox
- Related articles
Light gets vendor bills into your accounts payable (AP) queue three ways: file upload, email forwarding, and CSV bulk import. Every bill lands in the Inbox tab, ready to check and complete.
Three ways to bring a bill into Light
1. Upload a file (PDF, image, or CSV)
- Open the Light app and go to Spend management → Bills.
- Open the overflow menu in the Bills page header and choose Upload. This opens the Upload Bills drawer.
- Drop your files into the drawer, or click to browse. Light accepts PDF, JPG, JPEG, PNG, and TIFF/TIF, plus CSV for bulk import.
- Wait for Light to process the file. Processed bills appear in the Inbox tab.
Light runs every uploaded file through AI extraction, which reads the vendor, amounts, and line details automatically. See AI Invoice Extraction for how this works.
If AI extraction finds a PO number on the bill, Light matches the bill automatically to the correct open purchase order for that vendor. The PO link is already filled in when you open the bill in the Inbox. A bill Light can't match stays in the Inbox for you to link to a purchase order by hand. See Purchase Orders for how matching works.
The Inbox, Approving, Scheduled, Paid, and Discarded tables each carry a Matched PO column showing the purchase order number linked to a bill. Hover over a PO number to jump straight to that purchase order.
2. Forward the bill by email
Your organization has a dedicated bill forwarding email address. Email a bill attachment to that address, and Light adds it to the Inbox.
3. Import bills in bulk with a CSV
Upload a CSV through the same Upload Bills drawer used for files, to create multiple bills at once.
Completing a bill manually
However a bill arrives, you can open it in the Inbox and fill in or correct any field by hand. This is useful when OCR couldn't extract everything from a scanned document, or when you need to add line-level detail beyond what came through automatically.
Manual entry in Light always means completing a bill that already arrived through one of the three paths above. To enter a bill by hand, bring it in first, by upload or by email, then open it in the Inbox and type the details yourself.
What each field means
Once a bill is in the Inbox, open it to fill in or check these fields.
Header fields
- Vendor
- Entity
- Currency
- Invoice number, invoice date, and due date
- Payment method and Pay from account (defaults from the vendor's record)
- PO number, if the bill matches a purchase order
Line item fields, for each line:
- Description
- Amount, a single field per line with a tax toggle that covers net, tax, and total together
- Account, the GL account the line posts to
- Tax code
- Cost center or custom dimensions
- Releases, for spreading a cost over multiple periods with a start and end date. See Deferred Entries (Accruals and Deferrals).
Duplicate detection
Light checks every ingested bill for duplicates automatically. If it finds a possible match, it flags the bill with a duplicate indicator and moves it to a Duplicated status. Duplicated is a status badge that appears on the bill inside the Inbox. The Bills page itself has five tabs: Inbox, Approving, Scheduled, Paid, and Discarded.
Review the flagged bill before deciding to keep or discard it.
What happens after the Inbox
Once a bill's data is complete, Light moves it into approval. See Bill Approval.
Related articles
Also searched as: entering a bill in Light, uploading vendor invoices, AP bill entry, bulk CSV bill import, Pay from account field, GL account on a bill, Releases field, bill duplicate detection, Inbox tab for bills.