The Incoming Bill Wizard is a tool you can use when you receive an invoice from one of your vendors, and you want to quickly turn it into a bill in your Tailwind database. There are two ways to make use of this:

- Create a brand new bill
 - Associate the invoice you have received with a pre-existing bill

Using the wizard, the bill will be posted and ready to be paid to the carrier or vendor as soon as you have processed it. You can also use the tool to create deductions from company drivers and owner-operators and create service records on your equipment.

First, select a vendor. This will be the company you are set to pay on the invoice you have received. From here, you have two options:

- Choose Existing Bill
 - Create New Bill

If a payable for the vendor already exists in your system, and you wish to associate the invoice you have received with this payable, then you would select the “Choose Existing Bill” option. When this option is clicked, a list of all unposted bills for this vendor will populate. To associate the incoming invoice with a bill, click the green checkbox on the left-hand side of the bill.

The details of the bill will then populate, including all-expense items as well as the other fields related to the bill, such as reference number and PO number. These fields will be populated based on the bill selected. From here, populate or update any fields that need to be updated based on the invoice you have received from your vendor. If the vendor has changed the bill total, update the expense items too by adding, removing, or editing them as you see fit. For more information, see the “Creating, Editing, and Removing Payable Charges” section below.

Once all of the bill details have been updated to match the invoice you have received, click “Process” to finish the procedure. The bill will then be posted and available to pay on the Vendor Pay Screen. You will also be able to view the bill in the “Payables” list on the Administration side of the application.

If there is no payable in your database to reconcile with the invoice you have received, then select “Create New Bill.” This will allow you to first populate the bill details, including the reference number and amount, as well as other fields. After that, you will be able to add expense items up to the amount you have specified. View the “Creating, Editing, and Removing Payable Charges” section for more information on adding payable charges.

Once the bill details have been populated and all necessary payable charges have been added, click “Process” to finish the procedure. The bill will then be posted and become available to pay in the respective wizard. You will also be able to view the bill in the “Payables” list on the Administration side of the application.

Payable charges are the individual line items that make up the financial side of a bill. They can be added with as much or as little detail as you require. Adding payable charges to a bill in the “Incoming Invoice Wizard” is similar to adding expense items to a bill or revenue items to an invoice. To create a payable charge, select the charge type, then populate the units and unit rate, applying tax if necessary. You will need to create line items until the full amount of the bill has been accounted for.

You can edit existing payable charges by clicking the yellow pencil icon on the line item. You can remove payable charges by clicking the red garbage pail.

Within this tool, there are also added options to create additional records for each payable charge as part of the procedure. These are:

- Creating a deduction
 - Creating a service

Creating a deduction allows you to create a bill against a driver or owner-operator that is a negative equivalent to the line item you are creating. The most common circumstance for this would be a fuel bill. If you pay your owner operator’s fuel bills and deduct this amount from them later, then you would create the deduction using this area of the tool so that the deduction bill is created and posted, making it ready to apply to a future payment.

Creating a service allows you to quickly create a service against a piece of equipment to relate to the service bill you are entering via the tool. If, for example, a shop provides you with a bill for repairing a tire on a truck, you can create the service record for that tire repair against the equipment record using this tool. Then, you can view the service created by navigating to the equipment record.

Both deductions and services are created against the line items, meaning you can create multiple of each per bill but only one per line item.
​ 
​ TO RECEIVE MULTIPLE BILLS FROM CARRIERS
​ 
 Sometimes your carriers will send you an invoice that might have multiple trips on it that they have done for you, and this can be handled in Tailwind as you have the ability to receive multiple bills thru the “Incoming Bill Wizard.”
​

 When you open the Incoming Bill Wizard and choose the carrier sending you this invoice, you can then use the button “Choose Existing Bill.”
​ 
 And this will open a page that allows you to see all bills in the system for that particular carrier. Using the checkmark will allow you to choose each bill you want to include.
​

 The software will let you know if the bills you have chosen do not match the amount you entered for the invoice received from your carrier.
​ 
 Once you know it all balances, you click on the Process button, and that will post the bills and populate them on the Vendor Pay screen for payment.
​ 
​