Contractor invoices and the Friday pay run

Contractor invoices follow one path: Submitted → Approved → Queued → Paid. Contractors invoice against a purchase order in the portal, you approve or reject, and approved invoices batch into a pay run you push to Xero as bills. SmartM8 never pays anyone — payment happens in Xero, and paid bills reconcile back automatically.

What your contractor does

From a purchase order in their portal, they tap Invoice against this PO. The form is pre-filled from the PO — they can only adjust quantities down. They add their invoice number and date, optionally attach a PDF for your records, and tap Submit invoice. Anything over the PO quantity is rejected at submission, so your queue is clean from the start. If they need to bill more, increase the PO first.

Reviewing and paying

1. 01Open Contractor invoices in the sidebar (under Money). It opens on the Submitted tab — your review queue.
2. 02Open an invoice and tap Approve or Reject. Rejecting needs a reason, which the contractor sees in their portal. A rejected invoice can't be resubmitted — they submit a fresh one. Approval can't be undone.
3. 03Approved invoices wait on the Approved tab. A draft pay run creates itself every Friday at 9:00 AM Brisbane time (whenever there are approved invoices waiting) — or tap Create pay run any time. Either way there is one open draft, and newly approved invoices join it.
4. 04On the pay run page, tap the Send invoices to Xero button (it shows the count and total). Each invoice becomes a bill in Xero. If some fail, tap it again — it retries only the ones that didn't push, without duplicating bills.
5. 05Pay the bills in Xero as usual. When Xero marks a bill paid, the invoice flips to Paid here, and the contractor is notified by email and SMS.