Setting up an accounts payable workflow with Rutter
Introduction
Rutter API enables you to handle all of the common workflows needed to offer an accounts payable product to your customers.
- Connect to a business entity’s accounting system using Rutter Link. See Getting Started for more info on creating your first connection.
- Create or link the business entity’s Accounts used for logging Bills and Bill Payments.
- Create Bills and link Vendors, expense Accounts, Customers, Items, and Tracking Categories (Classes, Locations, and Departments).
- Upload Attachments to your logged Bills.
- Create and link Bill Payments and Bill Credit Memos to Vendors and unpaid Bills.
Create a Connection
Embed Rutter Link into your application and walk through an end to end business authentication flow in order to create a new Connection. This Connection represents the business accounting system and contains an access_token used to read and write data for that instance.
See our Getting Started guide for more information on creating your first Connection.
Create or link the bill payables account and bill payment account
When logging bills, every bill must pull from an account reflecting the payable liability. This is an Account of category = 'liability' and account_type = 'accounts_payable'.
When logging bill payments, every bill payment credits an account that serves as the source of funds for the payment. This is usually an Account that reflects a credit card (category = 'liability' and account_type = 'credit_card') or a bank (category = 'asset' and account_type = 'bank').
Companies vary in their accounting ledger design - some companies may contain an existing account in their chart of accounts for you to link bills and bill payments to, and other companies may require you to create a new account in their chart of accounts. The GET /accounts and POST /accounts APIs let you link existing accounts or create new ones if they don’t exist.
Creating a detailed bill
The POST /bills API lets you create a bill. There are a couple of important required and optional components:
Credit Account
This is the account being credited in the bill. This is an Account of category = 'liability' and account_type = 'accounts_payable'.
Vendor
This is the vendor linked to the bill. The GET /vendors and POST /vendors APIs let you create and link vendors as you log bills.
Expense Account
Every bill contains multiple line items, each of which debit an Account of account_type = expense. The GET /accounts API lets you fetch all accounts, and you can fetch all expense accounts by adding the account_type: expense query filter.
Customer
You may want to tie a bill to a Customer in order to better understand cost of goods sold. GET /customers lets you fetch all customers.
Item
You may want to tie a bill to an Item in order to better understand cost of goods sold. GET /items lets you fetch all items in the business entity’s catalog.
Tracking Categories
Tracking Categories are a way for a businesses to categorize bills. The three main dimensions used for categorization are Locations, Classes, and Departments. Use GET /locations, GET /classes, and GET /departments to fetch and attach the relevant categorizations.
Uploading an attachment to a logged bill
POST /attachments lets you upload the bill in PDF or image format and attach it to the logged bill.
Creating and applying bill payments and bill credit memos
To create and link bill payments and bill credit memos, you can use POST /bill_payments and POST /bill_credit_memos. A Bill Payment credits an account that serves as the source of funds for the payment (usually an Account that reflects a credit card or bank), and can be applied to one or more bills. A Bill Credit Memo can be created with POST /bill_credit_memos and is attached to a Vendor. The bill credit memo can be created and immediately applied to a bill, or created unapplied.