On the buy-side, Zoho's vendor portal lets your suppliers self-serve and submit invoices directly to your books. Combined with the bills module, it streamlines the whole accounts-payable workflow.
What you'll learn
→ Vendor portal setup → Bill processing workflow → Three-way matching → Payment runsVendor portal setup
Settings → Vendor Portal → Enable. Choose what vendors can see, purchase orders, bills, payments, and the documents you have shared with them. Most useful: PO visibility (vendors confirm receipt) and payment status (reduces 'when will I be paid?' emails).
Per vendor, Purchases → Vendors → [Vendor] → Send Portal Invitation. The vendor sets up access and can submit bills against your POs directly. Reduces the back-and-forth of email PDFs and re-keyed data.
Bill processing workflow
Bills enter Zoho four ways: vendor portal submission, email forward to a dedicated bills@ address (Zoho's email-to-bill feature), manual entry, or scan-and-upload of a PDF (Zoho's OCR extracts data). Pick a primary channel; the others are fallbacks.
Approval workflow: bills above a threshold route to an approver. Settings → Bills → Approval. Set thresholds and approvers. The bill cannot be marked as approved-for-payment until the workflow completes. Audit-friendly and prevents accidental payments.
Three-way matching
Best practice: match bill to purchase order to goods receipt note. Zoho supports this for inventory items, the bill won't auto-approve if quantities or prices differ from the PO. Variances above tolerance route to a manager for resolution.
Even without a PO module, a manual three-way match is good discipline: bill on screen, PO email, delivery note attached. Bills without all three documented are paid only after explicit override. The friction reduces invoice fraud and quantity errors.
Payment runs
Purchases → Payments Made → Pay Bills (Bulk). Filter by due date, by vendor, or by amount. Zoho generates a payment file (CSV) you upload to your bank's bulk payment portal. After the bank executes, the bills are marked paid in Zoho automatically via the bank feed.
Run weekly. Most UAE banks support batch payment files (Mashreq Pay-Out, ENBD Direct Remit, ADCB ProCash). The setup is once; subsequent runs are 10 minutes. Beats individual transfers from internet banking and reduces transaction fees.
This guide is general information, not professional advice. For situations that involve specific facts, talk to your accountant, or hire one of ours from the marketplace.