Any expense shows as ‘Unpaid’ if it is not matched to a bank transaction.
Your transactions should automatically be matched to your expenses if you use Business Finance Assistant to create them before making payments to your suppliers.
If Business Finance Assistant has not automatically matched your expense to the transaction, follow these steps:
- Locate the outgoing transaction from your Bank Transactions page
- Press 'Split/attach'
- Press 'Match/Attach Document'
- Choose 'Expense'
- Select the relevant expense from the list of expenses
- Press 'Done'
- Press 'Confirm'
The transactions will then appear in your VAT return and your expenses will have a ‘Paid’ status.
If the expense amount and/or date range does not exactly match the associated transaction, or you created the expense using Business Finance Assistant after the transaction has appeared in your bank account, the expense will not be matched to the transaction.
Instead, Business Finance Assistant will automatically generate an expense as a record of payment (example in image below). This Business Finance Assistant-generated expense is automatically matched to the bank transaction even when you subsequently create or uploaded an expense.
In accrual accounting, the transaction will appear on your VAT return separately from the expense you created if:
- The Business Finance Assistant generated expense remains matched to the transaction
- You set a VAT rate for the transaction and mark it as ‘Reviewed’
In this scenario, the expense will become a duplicate and will show as ‘Unpaid’ in:
- The ‘Outgoings’ widget on the dashboard
- The ‘Outstanding’ section of the ‘Outgoings’ page
- The ‘Unpaid’ tab of the ‘Expenses’ page
You must ensure your bank transactions are correctly matched to expenses to avoid duplicate VAT entries in your VAT return. As part of this, you should check that the status of expenses correctly changes from ‘Unpaid’ to ‘Paid’.
See FAQ ‘How do I correctly match documentary evidence to my bank transactions?’