Scheduling and Releasing Payments

What is this page about: This page explains how approved bills move through Light's payment process, from the moment a bill is approved to the moment it's marked paid. It's written for anyone who schedules, approves, or reconciles vendor payments, whether you think of the process as "releasing a payment batch" or as "running a payment run."

# On this page

• The payment workflow
• Finding bills that are ready for payment
• Setting a payment date and submitting a batch
• Payment batch states and bill payment states
• Recording a payment made outside Light
• Retrying a failed payment
• Related articles

Once Light approves a bill, it either gets scheduled for payment directly or, if your workspace has a payment guardrail turned on, it joins a payment batch that needs a second, separate approval before release.

# The payment workflow

Once a bill is approved, it moves into the payment workflow. What happens next depends on whether your workspace has a payment guardrail configured, an approval control your admin can turn on for payments.

• With a payment guardrail: Light groups approved bills into payment batches. You submit each batch for a separate approval, then release it. Think of a batch as a payment run, a group of payments that gets approved and released together.
• Without a payment guardrail: approved bills are scheduled for payment directly, with no separate batch approval step.

Navigate via Spend management → Bills → Scheduled in Light.

# Finding bills that are ready for payment

The Scheduled tab in Light has three sections:

• Ready for release: approved bills that haven't yet been submitted for payment. Each row shows the bill, vendor, due date, and current payment date.
• Awaiting approval: bills in a batch that's been submitted and is waiting on a payment approver.
• Released: bills whose batch has been approved and released for payment.

Most of your work happens in Ready for release, covered in the steps below.

# Setting a payment date and submitting a batch

To prepare a payment batch in Light:

1. Select the bills you want to pay, using the checkboxes in the Ready for release section.
2. A floating action bar appears at the bottom of the screen once you've selected at least one bill.
3. Click the calendar icon in the action bar to set the payment date for the selected bills. This opens a Change payment date dialog with a calendar picker.
4. Optionally, click the message icon to add a comment to the batch, useful for giving your approver context.
5. Click Submit for approval to send the batch to your configured payment approver(s).

# Payment batch states and bill payment states

These are two different sets of statuses, and it helps to keep them apart.

The batch itself moves through one of three states: PENDING, APPROVED, or DECLINED.

Each bill inside the batch moves through its own, more detailed set of states. You'll see these reflected in Light's UI and in any export that includes a raw status field:

The Paid tab lists bills that have completed payment. The Discarded tab lists cancelled or discarded bills. It tracks bills rather than batches.

# Recording a payment made outside Light

For bills paid outside Light, for example, a manual wire transfer, open the bill or use the batch menu and choose Mark as paid. This opens a dialog where you record the payment details, so the bill moves to Paid without going through Light's payment rails.

To do this for several bills at once, select them and use the Batch mark as paid action.

# Retrying a failed payment

You can retry certain failed payments directly from the bill's menu. Retry payment appears when the bill is in the Unpaid state and the failure is one Light allows you to re-trigger by hand.

When it is available, clicking Retry payment opens a confirmation dialog first. If the original failure was a validation error, the dialog notes that no funds moved. Otherwise, it shows a warning that funds may already have left your account and asks you to verify with your bank before proceeding; you confirm by clicking I have verified, retry.

# Related articles

• Bill Approval
• Multi-Currency Payments
• Credit Entries (Vendor Credits)

Also searched as: schedule a vendor payment, release a payment batch, bill payment statuses, mark a bill as paid manually, retry a failed payment, payment guardrail, Discarded tab in Bills.