# What is accounts payable?

URL: https://www.orla.finance/en/glossary/accounts-payable
Markdown twin of that page. Append `.md` to any Orla page URL to get one.

Accounts payable (AP) is the money a business owes its suppliers for goods and services already received and invoiced but not yet paid: a current liability on the balance sheet.

In daily work AP is the list of bills waiting to be paid. AP and AR are mirrors. Accounts receivable is what clients owe you. Between the two sits the cash cycle: the days you wait to be paid minus the days you take to pay, and a positive number is money you are fronting for everyone else.

What AP is made of: supplier bills, each with a supplier, an invoice number, an amount, a currency and a due date, usually on terms like [net 30](https://www.orla.finance/en/glossary/net-30). A partial payment reduces the remainder and so does a credit note; what is owed is always the remainder. A subscription charged to a card is not AP, because the money has already left.

AP aging is the same list sorted by how far past due each bill is, in buckets: current, 1 to 30 days, 31 to 60, older. It answers two questions: which supplier to pay first when cash is short, and which supplier you always pay late, which is what that supplier sees of you.

Three controls for a team without an AP clerk. Bank details come from the supplier's card in your address book and never from the bill, because the most common supplier fraud is a real supplier's compromised mailbox sending a real-looking invoice with new bank details. The same supplier and invoice number is never entered twice. And above a threshold a second person signs, and that person is never the one who entered the bill. A company with a purchasing department adds the [three-way match](https://www.orla.finance/en/glossary/three-way-match).

#### How this shows up in Orla

Bills to pay is the AP list. A bill arrives from an email forwarded to the space's own address or from a document filed as one, with the amount and the due date read off the file; from another Orla space that invoiced you; or typed by hand. A supplier nobody has in Contacts is flagged "unverified sender", and the same supplier and invoice number twice is refused. Bank details never live on a bill: paying it reads the supplier's contact card.

The page leads with what is owed on accepted and part-paid bills, how much of that is past due, how many bills await acceptance and what was paid to suppliers this month. Tick several bills and Pay selected pays them as one payout run from an account you choose, under the same approval rules as payout batches; a bill paid from a bank account waits to be marked paid until the transfer is confirmed. Orla takes nothing on paying a bill: the payment carries its own rail's cost. AP aging is one of the business reports, on Pro and above; receiving bills by email is part of the paid plans.

#### Related terms

- Net 30: https://www.orla.finance/en/glossary/net-30
- Three-way match: https://www.orla.finance/en/glossary/three-way-match
- 1099-NEC: https://www.orla.finance/en/glossary/1099-nec

#### Read next

- Supplier bill approvals for a small team: https://www.orla.finance/en/blog/supplier-bill-approvals-small-team
- Bills in, payments out, under a rule you set: https://www.orla.finance/en/product/money
- Supplier bills in an e-commerce business: https://www.orla.finance/en/for/e-commerce