Tally
Bills Receivable in Tally: what it is and how to read it
"Bills Receivable" isn't a menu item in Tally — it's the bill-wise detail sitting underneath your party balances. Most owners only ever see the total. This is where the ageing actually lives.
Gateway of Tally → Display More Reports → Statements of Accounts → Outstandings → Receivables (Tally Prime), or Display → Statements of Accounts → Outstandings → Receivables (ERP 9). This is the same report most people call the "outstanding receivables report" — Bills Receivable is the accounting term for the same list, split by individual bill instead of by party.
Party balance vs. bill-wise receivable
A party's closing balance is one number — what they owe you in total, today. It's fine for a trial balance and useless for collections, because it can't tell you which invoice is overdue, only that the customer owes money somewhere. Bills Receivable breaks that same balance into its component bills, each with its own date, due date and age.
| Report | Shows | Good for |
|---|---|---|
| Party ledger / balance | One number per customer | Trial balance, confirming a total |
| Bills Receivable (bill-wise) | Every open invoice, its date and age | Deciding who to call, and about which bill |
If your Bills Receivable report shows only one line per customer instead of one per invoice, Bill-wise details is switched off in that ledger or company. See the fix below — it's the single most common reason this report looks wrong.
Turning it on: Bill-wise details
- F11 (Company Features) → Accounting Features → set Maintain bill-wise details to Yes (and, if you want it for non-trading accounts too, for non-trading a/cs also to Yes).
- This must also be enabled on each customer ledger (Accounts Info → Ledgers → Alter → Maintain balances bill-by-bill: Yes). A company-level Yes doesn't retroactively apply to ledgers created before it was turned on.
- It only affects new entries going forward — historical vouchers entered without bill references won't retroactively gain bill-wise ageing. For those, Tally offers a one-time "New Ref" allocation, but it's manual, bill by bill.
Reading the ageing columns
Once bill-wise detail is on, the report can be viewed with an ageing analysis — Tally buckets each open bill by how many days it's been outstanding (commonly 0-30 / 31-60 / 61-90 / 90+, configurable). Two things trip people up here:
- Ageing is calculated from the bill date, not the due date, unless you've set explicit credit periods per bill or ledger. A 45-day-credit customer's invoice reads as "60 days old" the same as a cash-on-delivery customer's — you have to know each customer's actual terms to judge what's really overdue.
- Advances and credit notes show as negative bills in the same list unless specifically excluded, which can make a customer's true exposure look smaller (or larger) than it is at a glance.
Exporting it for collections work
The report itself doesn't answer "who do I call today" — it's a ledger, not a priority list. To turn 200 open bills into that, you need to know, per customer: how many days overdue against their terms, whether they've paid other invoices while this one sat open (a dispute signal, not a cash-flow one), and how they've behaved on past chases. That's the export → analysis step covered in how to export the outstanding receivables report.
Upload your Tally Bills Receivable export. See real DSO against each customer's own terms, and which of your open bills is a dispute in disguise — no signup for the health check.
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