What happens to an ordinary cash sale

Play this lesson as slides — one slide per step, with the same narration. The full text of every step is on this page.

This lesson is for you if you ring up dozens of ordinary walk-in sales a shift and want to know what becomes of them. In about seven minutes you will be able to follow one receipt from the moment you press Final to the moment the Inland Revenue Board, LHDN, has it, and you will see that almost none of that journey is yours. That is the point of the lesson: knowing which part is your job stops you doing things to a bill that nobody asked you to do.

Step 1 — Understand what Final actually starts

After this step you will know why the till goes quiet for a moment and why nothing is finished when the drawer opens. While a bill is a draft, nothing has happened at all: the ledger has not heard of it and no stock has moved. Final is the event. In one press BigLedger gives the bill its number, posts the sale and the tax, writes a line to the cash or card record for every payment you took, sends the goods out of stock, adds the member’s points if there is a member on the bill, and queues the sale for e-invoicing. The word to hold on to is queued. All of that runs in background jobs afterwards, not inside the button press.

Reference: Core Concepts — 1. FINAL is the only moment that matters

Step 2 — Follow the receipt into the Batch Pool

After this step you will know the one word that explains almost every “where is my e-invoice” question. Between your till and LHDN there are two kinds of waiting room. A queue holds something that is complete and on its way; you only have to wait. A pool holds something that cannot be sent yet, and it sits there until a person does something. An ordinary walk-in receipt with no buyer details goes into the Batch Pool, and the Batch Pool is the one pool that empties itself: next month’s consolidation sweeps it. A Batch Pool full of receipts is not a backlog. It is a healthy shop.

Reference: Pools and queues — How it behaves in BigLedger

Step 3 — See what gets built from it at month end

After this step you will be able to tell a customer, or a colleague, exactly when their sale reaches LHDN. Nothing is consolidated at the moment of sale. After the month closes, a background job gathers the waiting receipts and builds the consolidated e-invoices from them, then sends them off. On one of those, the buyer is recorded as General Public rather than a name. Your receipt is linked back to the e-invoice that reported it, so the question “which e-invoice covered this sale” always has an answer. The deadline is the seventh of the following month.

Reference: Consolidated e-invoices — How it behaves in BigLedger

Step 4 — Leave the skip control alone

After this step you will recognise the one tick box on a cash bill that can quietly lose a sale. On the e-invoice buyer details of a bill there is a skip e-invoice control. Skipping is a deliberate decision for sales that must not be e-invoiced at all — for instance where the other party issues the e-invoice instead of you — and it is a decision your finance team makes, not a way to get past a screen that is slowing you down. A skipped sale drops out of one half of the month-end report and is still counted as missing on the other, so a sale you skip by mistake turns into a question somebody in the office has to answer. Do not tick it unless you have been told to.

Reference: E-Invoice Pools & Submission Routing — Frequently asked questions

Step 5 — Know what normal looks like from where you stand

After this step you will know when there is nothing to check, which is most of the time. The pools and the queues are not on your screen. They live in a different applet, My E-Invoice Admin, which your finance team runs — so there is no list for you to watch and nothing for you to clear. Your check is the bill itself: it finalised, it printed, and the money you took matches what is on it. If a customer rings the shop next week because their e-invoice has not arrived, the answer is a date if they never gave you their details, and a question for the office if they did. Take the bill number either way; the person who can look it up is in the office, not at the counter.

Reference: E-Invoice Pools & Submission Routing — What you can do in each pool

How the steps fit together

    flowchart TD
  s1["Step 1 — Understand what Final actually starts"]
  s2["Step 2 — Follow the receipt into the Batch Pool"]
  s3["Step 3 — See what gets built from it at month end"]
  s4["Step 4 — Leave the skip control alone"]
  s5["Step 5 — Know what normal looks like from where you stand"]
  s1 --> s2
  s2 --> s3
  s3 --> s4
  s4 --> s5
  

Check yourself

Three to five questions on what you just heard. Every correct answer links to the page that makes it correct, so you can check the source, not just the mark.

Next lesson: Take the buyer’s details at the till · Back to the course