Disbursement Vouchers: Approving Payments Before Money Moves

When only the owner ever spends money, approvals are ceremony. The moment an employee can trigger a payment — cutting checks for suppliers, paying rent, releasing a reimbursement — you need the classic control every accountant and BIR auditor looks for: a disbursement voucher. It is the numbered document that says "this payment was checked and authorized before the money moved," with the signatures to prove who prepared it, who approved it, who released the cash, and who received it.

When to Use a Voucher

• Paying supplier bills — especially batched "check releasing day" payments, where accounting prepares vouchers during the week and the approver signs the stack at once.
• Recurring obligations — rent, utilities, loan amortizations, government remittances. The voucher trail answers "did we already pay September rent?" at a glance.
• Reimbursements and large one-off purchases — anything big enough that a second pair of eyes should sign before money moves.
• Anything an auditor will ask about. A payment with no voucher and no signatures is a finding.

Vouchers are optional per payment. A solo owner-operator can keep marking expenses paid directly; the voucher path is there for stores where the person who approves a spend and the person who hands over the money should be different people.

The Workflow

Open Accounting & Finance → Disbursements. Every voucher moves through four steps:

1. Prepare. Click New Voucher, pick the documents to pay — approved expenses (always paid in full) and open supplier bills (partial amounts allowed) — for one payee, choose cash, check, or bank transfer, and save. The voucher gets a sequential number like DV-2026-000123 and sits as a draft. Nothing has been paid.
2. Submit & approve. Submit the draft, and someone with the Approve Disbursement Vouchers permission reviews and approves it — this is where the invoices get checked against the amounts. The preparer cannot approve their own voucher (owners excepted); a rejected voucher can be reinstated to draft, fixed, and resubmitted.
3. Release. Someone with the Release Payments permission releases the approved voucher, choosing the payment date. All the underlying payments record together in one go — every expense marked paid, every bill payment posted to your books — or, if any document can no longer be paid, nothing records at all. For check payments, one check covering the whole voucher lands in the Check Register automatically.
4. Sign. Print the voucher from its detail page. Prepared by, Approved by, and Released by are filled in from the workflow; the Received by line stays blank on purpose — the payee signs the paper when they collect the check or cash. Staple it to the supplier's invoice and you have an audit-ready record.

Who Can Do What

Three permissions under Accounts Payable in role settings drive the workflow:

• Manage Disbursement Vouchers — create, edit, and submit vouchers.
• Approve Disbursement Vouchers — approve, reject, or void them.
• Release Payments — release approved vouchers, and mark expenses as paid anywhere in the system. This is the "money actually moves" permission.

For real segregation of duties, give these to different people: the bookkeeper prepares, the manager approves, the owner or cashier releases. Roles that could approve expenses before this feature automatically hold all three, so nothing breaks — trim them down when you're ready.

Good to Know

• A document sitting on an open voucher can't be added to a second one, so nothing gets paid twice.
• An unreleased voucher can be voided at any time with no effect on your books — its documents simply become available again. A released voucher can't be voided; correct mistakes on the underlying expense or bill instead.
• Expense approvals follow the same discipline now: drafts must be submitted before approval, and staff can't approve their own expense requests — the system asks for a different approver.
• Approving, releasing, and voiding vouchers are all recorded in the audit log with who did what and when.

When One Person Both Encodes and Approves

By default, the person who requested an expense cannot be the one who approves it, and the person who prepared a disbursement voucher cannot approve that voucher — even if their role has "Approve Expenses" or "Approve Disbursement Vouchers". The system asks for a different approver. Store owners are always exempt.

A small store with a single bookkeeper may prefer to let that person sign off on their own entries. Go to Staff → Roles, edit the role, and tick Approve Own Expenses in the Expenses section. Roles holding it can approve their own expense requests and the vouchers they prepared. Nobody has it until you grant it.

• The audit trail is unchanged: every expense and voucher still records who requested or prepared it and who approved it, so self-approvals remain visible to anyone reviewing the books.
• If the Approve button is missing on a pending expense, the page now tells you why. "Needs a different approver" means the viewer is the requester.
• Drafts still have to be submitted before they can be approved, with or without this capability.

Official Receipt Number and Proof of Payment

When you Release Funds, the window now asks for the payee's Official Receipt / Acknowledgment number and lets you attach a proof of payment (a photo of the OR, the bank transfer confirmation, or the signed voucher; JPEG, PNG, WebP or PDF up to 10MB). Both are optional at release time, but they close the loop: the OR number is stamped on every supplier payment the voucher releases and shown on the bill and voucher pages, and the proof lands in the Gallery linked to the voucher and to each payment.

The same fields appear on Record Payment for a single bill. A file that is the wrong type or too large is rejected before any payment is recorded, so a bad upload can never leave a released voucher without its proof. If the OR arrives later, attach it from the Document Inbox and link it to the payment.