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This would be a great improvement and actually make purchase orders worthwhile. We just got PO's and invoices importing from our job management system to Xero - but Xero won't match the two! This means we have to then manually go and mark all the PO's as billed. What we thought was going to cut our workload in half is now giving us more work on Xero!

Seriously, it's been 3 years since this idea was posted, and we STILL don't have a solution?

The solution is to add an Invoice #/Bill # to bills, and link the Reference # to Purchase Orders.

It would be great if the new smart document capture could link the bill that's being created to a purchase order. At the moment the only way to do this is to copy the purchase order to the bill. All our bills have to be linked to the PO's so not being able to do this in the new document capture tool makes it useless.

I wanted to share a workflow improvement idea based on how we currently use Xero alongside EzzyBills.

At present, our process is:

Staff raise purchase orders internally
Orders are placed with suppliers
Supplier invoices are received and imported via EzzyBills
Invoices are then posted directly into Xero

The challenge we have is that the purchase order currently serves very little practical purpose in the system, as the invoice effectively becomes the trigger document for processing and approval.

What we would find highly valuable is:
A feature that allows imported invoices (via EzzyBills or similar integrations) to be automatically or manually matched against existing purchase orders.

Key benefits would include:

Turning purchase orders into meaningful control documents rather than standalone records
Enabling variance checking (price/quantity differences)
Improving financial control and audit trails
Reducing manual reconciliation effort
Supporting better approval workflows before payment

Ideally, this could include:

Suggested PO matching based on supplier, amount, or reference
Highlighting discrepancies between PO and invoice
Allowing partial matches or multiple POs per invoice where required

At the moment, the lack of this linkage means the PO process is largely duplicated effort without system enforcement.

I believe this would add significant value for businesses using Xero alongside invoice capture tools and strengthen the overall purchasing workflow.

Happy to discuss further or provide more detail on our use case if helpful.

At the moment, when a bill is sat in drafts, because it has gone through the upload process, it does not match with any unbilled purchase orders. Would be good if you could select the PO it relates to from a list or something

agree, the ability to receipt individual lines on a PO but not show the entire PO as billed or outstanding would be highly beneficial

Option to match imported purchase invoices (from Apron/Hubdoc etc) to existing xero purchase orders, rather than convert the PO to a bill and then have to find and manually add the purchase invoice.

When you raise a new bill, there should be an option to bill the PO it relates to without having to go to the PO section.

Currently, you have to do it the other way round and close the PO and then raise a draft bill.

Also need a option where we can link a Purchase Order raised by us to a bill issued by the supplier against the Purchase Order with just entering PO number or selecting from dropdown box rather than changing PO to draft bill or physically downloading the PO and uploading it to the bill. As suggested need option to reconcile the bill amount with PO amount and if partly claimed need a option to automatically record the part claim in PO.

Yes totally agree - I've been asking this for ages!!!! Especially in promoting eInvoicing - how can this work if we get a bill coming in direct through the eInvoice interface into bills, but we then need to link it to the PO... defeats the purpose of a purchasing system. You URGENTLY need to update if you want to support the EInvoice government interface correctly.

We have the same problem with many clients - They would like reports on Bills that do not have a purchase order allocation and the amounts outstanding on purchase orders

This would be very helpful. Right now there is no way of knowing how much has been billed against a PO if there are multiple shipments/invoices under a PO. The ability to have a report showing outstanding purchase orders would be helpful to plan cash flows.

We have the same problem. We receive Bills from our supplier via the Automated bills entry email address. It's seems a bit counter productive that we have to download the PDF, deleted the Bill that's already in the system and the go into Purchase Orders, generate a new Bill and then reattach that PDF.

I hope they fix this soon, seems like a glaringly obvious thing that needs fixing. Complete waste of mine and my staffs time.

To be able to link bills to approved POs

eg: invoice in from supplier, when posting invoice have option to add in a PO number and then the value of that bill will match directly to PO/lines on that PO so in essence you can not post more invoices against the PO than the PO is worth. Enables easier tracking of POs and to clearly see where a supplier has over charged or any payment variances

can directly match to lines from PO to invoice and add in correct qty shown on invoice which, again, will then be 'marked off' on PO so you can not most more against than the PO is worth - stopping and price/qty variances