Clio Accounting: Funds Out—Vendors and Vendor Bills

In Clio Accounting, you can view all of your vendor bills, expenses, and hard costs from the Funds out tab. This articles covers what you need to know about vendors and vendor bills. For information about hard costs, refer to Clio Accounting: Funds out—Hard Costs and for information about expenses, refer to Clio Accounting: Funds Out—Expenses.

• Vendors are people or businesses that supply products or services to your law firm, such as banks, catering companies, office supply depots, airlines, transportation services, software services, and more.
• You can create vendor bills in Clio Accounting to keep track of the bills you receive from your vendors.

Add vendors

Your firm may pay for vendor services such as IT services, purchases, transportation costs, rent, office supplies, etc. You can add a vendor separately from operating expenses by following the steps below, or you can add a vendor while adding an operating expense.

1. Go to the main Funds out tab, then click the Vendors subtab.
2. Click New vendor.
3. Enter the vendor’s name in Company name and complete any other fields relevant to the vendor.

   • The EIN (Employer Identification Number) and 1099 vendor fields are for taxation purposes. 1099 vendors are trade and non-trade individuals or companies that provide goods, services, or contract work for your firm, and where your firm does not deduct taxes from amounts paid to these vendors. If your vendor is a 1099 vendor, you will need to report the amount paid to this vendor to the IRS and issue a 1099-NEC Form to the vendor.

     Tip: The vendor expense report can be used to quickly find the amounts paid to vendors for a specified time period.
4. Click Save vendor to save the vendor and close the new vendor modal, or click Save vendor and add new expense to save the vendor and create a new expense under that vendor.

Search and view vendors

When viewing a specific vendor, you can view all transactions or expenses associated with the vendor. From that page view, you can also view, edit, or delete expense transactions.

1. Go to the Funds out tab, click the Vendors subtab.
2. In the Search for vendor field, enter a keyword to quickly find a vendor.
3. Click the vendor's name to view operating expenses associated with the vendor and/or the vendor details.

Edit vendors

1. Go to Funds out tab, click the Vendors subtab.
2. Optional: In the Search for vendor field, enter a keyword to quickly find a vendor.
3. For the relevant vendor, click Edit in the Actions column.
4. Make any changes and then click Save vendor.

Inactivate or delete vendors

You can delete a vendor only if no operating expenses are associated with it. If a vendor has one or more associated expenses, you can inactivate it instead. This preserves your accounting records while removing the vendor from active use.

1. Go to Funds out tab, click the Vendors subtab.
2. Optional: In the Search for vendor field, enter a keyword to quickly find a vendor.
3. For the relevant vendor, click the more icon (the horizontal ellipses) in the Actions column.
4. Select Make inactive or Delete.

Reactivate vendors

1. Go to Funds out tab, click the Vendors subtab.
2. Click the Active quick filter, then select Inactive to toggle to previously deactivated vendors.
3. Optional: In the Search for vendor field, enter a keyword to quickly find a vendor.
4. For the relevant vendor, click the more icon (the horizontal ellipses) in the Actions column.
5. Select Make active.

Generate vendor expense report

The vendor expenses report provides information about all payments made to firm’s external vendors that are not related to a client or a matter. The list provides individual payments for the specified time period and includes the name of the vendor, the transaction date, the category of the payment, the description, whether the vendor is a 1099 vendor (as specified when you added the vendor), and the transaction amount.

1. Go to Funds out tab, then select the Expenses subtab, and click Export to CSV.
2. Select a reporting period or set a custom period using Start date and End date.
3. Click Generate.

Your CSV file will be downloaded to your computer.

Manage vendor bills

Autofill a vendor bill from an upload

In addition to manually filling information for a vendor bill and adding it to Clio, you can upload a PDF, PNG, or JPG of the invoice to have the key fields pre-populated automatically. Fields that can be extracted include the vendor, bill number, bill date, due date, and line item details including category, client, matter, description, and amount. You can review all extracted values before saving to Clio.

1. Click the global Add transaction menu, then select Vendor bill. Alternatively, click the main Funds out tab, then select the Vendor subtab and click Add vendor bill.
2. Click Auto-fill from file, or drag and drop the file into the upload area.
   • Supported file types: PDF, JPG, PNG
   • Maximum file size: 5 MB

3. Review the pre-populated fields and fill any empty fields.

   Note: For the Who do you owe? field, Clio suggests the closest match from your existing vendor list. If no match is found, click the down arrow for the field and click Add new vendor to create a new vendor without leaving the form.

4. Optional: To link a line item to an existing hard cost synced from Clio Manage, toggle Hard cost on for that line item.
   • If no automatic match is found, select Browse all to link to an existing hard cost manually.
5. Optional: Click + Add line item to add any line items that were not extracted.
6. Click Save to save and exit, or Save and create another to upload more vendor bills.

Pay vendor bill

1. Go to the Funds out tab, and click the Vendor bills subtab.
2. For the relevant vendor bills, click Mark as paid.
3. Enter the necessary information in the modal.
4. Optional: If you want to make a single lump sum payment to cover more than one bill from the vendor, start typing the bill number in the Select bill(s) field to add the bill. 
5. Click Post payment.