Tracking a Bill — the Lifecycle Panel
The chain behind a bill, the documents at each stage, and the variances Trabalance computes for you.
Every saved purchase document carries a Lifecycle panel. It answers the question a bill on its own cannot: where did this come from, what has happened since, and does the chain agree with itself?
The panel does two things. It lays out the documents in the chain — the purchase order and goods received note behind the bill, the payments and debit notes in front of it — and it compares them, surfacing rate variances, quantity shortages and payment timing without you opening a single linked document.
The Chain Rail
The rail across the top is the process at a glance — Order → Delivery → Bill → Payment. Stages that exist in this chain get a filled dot; the stage the document you are looking at belongs to is accented; stages that were skipped stay ghosted.
A chain with a ghosted Order stage tells you at once that this bill was raised directly, with no purchase order behind it.
Stages on a Purchase Document
Which stages appear depends on the document you opened.
| You are looking at | Stages shown | Stages that offer a Create action |
|---|---|---|
| Purchase Order | Goods received · Bills · Payments | Create GRN · Create bill |
| Goods Received Note | Purchase order · Bills · Payments | Create bill |
| Bill | Payments · Returns · Goods received · Purchase order | Record Payment (while a balance remains) · Create debit note |
| Payment | Bills · Goods received · Purchase order · Returns | — |
| Debit Note | Bills · Refunds | Create refund |
The panel walks the chain two hops in both directions, so a payment surfaces not only the bills it settled but the goods received notes and the purchase order behind them. Links respect your permissions — a document you may not read is not listed.
What the Panel Computes
This is the part that does the work for you. Trabalance compares the linked documents and writes plain-language findings, ordered by severity — problems first, then confirmations — and shows at most five.
| Compared | Finding | Tone |
|---|---|---|
| Order ↔ Delivery | Over-received against the order on N items — with an Item / Ordered / Received / Δ table | Warning |
| Order ↔ Delivery | Fully delivered — 100% of the ordered quantity received | Success |
| Order ↔ Delivery | N% of the ordered quantity delivered — shortage of X | Info |
| Order ↔ Billing | Billed above the order rate on N items — with an Item / Order rate / Billed rate table | Warning |
| Order ↔ Billing | Rate shortage — billed below the order rate on N items | Warning |
| Order ↔ Billing | Billed rates match the order | Success |
| Order ↔ Billing | Under-billed: X of Y ordered — or Billed X above the order | Info / Warning |
| Delivery ↔ Billing | Billed quantity differs from delivered on N items — with an Item / Delivered / Billed table | Warning |
| Billing ↔ Payment | Paid N days before the due date · Paid on the due date · Paid N days after the due date | Success / Info / Danger |
Rate comparisons ignore differences below half a cent, and quantity comparisons ignore differences below 0.005, so rounding never raises a false warning. Variance tables list up to six items — enough to see the pattern.
The Order ↔ Delivery, Order ↔ Billing and Delivery ↔ Billing findings are exactly the three comparisons a three-way match asks for. Open the bill's Lifecycle panel before you approve it: if the rate and quantity findings all come back green, the match holds. See Three-way match.
Creating the Next Document from the Panel
Each stage that can produce a document carries its own Create button, which is the shortest path through the cycle:
- On a purchase order — Create GRN, Create bill
- On a goods received note — Create bill
- On a bill — Record Payment (shown only while the balance is greater than zero) and Create debit note
- On a debit note — Create refund
Creating from the panel is what links the documents. Typing a PO number into the bill's PO Number field does not — that field is a reference for the printed document, nothing more.
Related
- The comparison the panel automates: Three-way match.
- Converting from the panel or the Convert to menu: Converting a purchase order.
- Raising the return the Returns stage links to: Debit notes.
- The payments the Payments stage lists: Piecemeal payment.