We agree associating inventory receipts with “Bills” in Xero definitely isn’t a perfect one-to-one relationship. As you’ve pointed out, a bill in Xero is actually a purchase invoice, rather than a receipt of goods. However, as Breww doesn’t currently support purchase invoices, we had the choice of either driving the bill upload in Xero (and other accountancy integrations) either from a purchase order or an inventory receipt.
In our experience (although I totally accept this won’t always be the case!), suppliers tend to invoice per delivery, rather than per purchase order. For example, if a purchase order is fulfilled over two deliveries, we’ve found they tend to invoice twice, once for the goods on the first delivery and again for the goods on the next, rather than a single invoice covering both deliveries. So that’s why we chose to upload inventory receipts as bills rather than purchase orders.
The idea behind the three inventory receipt statuses (Draft, Added to Stock, Invoiced by Supplier) is then to allow the production and warehouse staff to simply be able to record the delivery as “Added to Stock” before the finance team can move it on to “Invoiced by Supplier” and store the invoice against the inventory receipt once the invoice has been received. The purchase invoice is then created in your accountancy software, ready to be reconciled against the payment.
There’s definitely always scope for improvement, so we can always look at adding more flexibility in how you’d like the flow to work - but I hope that explains why we’ve set it up the way we have so far! The ideal solution might be that Breww fully supports purchase invoices as well, which can be associated with inventory receipts/purchase orders and then Breww can upload them to Xero - it would be interesting to get people’s thoughts on this! We have a feature request here which is aimed at solving the same situation: