Purchase invoice: pull in the receipt and check the bill against the paper
Steps 3 and 4 of Purchase Invoice Processing: bring the finalised goods received note into the invoice, put the supplier’s date back, and check the bill against the paper before you commit. It follows Step 2, where you picked the supplier; the header and its date are from Step 1.
The running example: the supplier’s invoice is for the earbud delivery at GS-KV-01 — 200 units at RM 128, RM 25,600 net, RM 1,536 SST at 6%, RM 27,136 total.
Before you knock anything off, check the receipt path in Before you start: if your goods came in on a Purchase GRN Stock In, you must bill them with a Purchase Invoice No Stock In, not this document. A GRN Stock In followed by a full Purchase Invoice counts the same goods into stock twice, and it produces no error.
Step 3: Pull in the receipt
Finance > Purchase Invoice (Internal) > (your draft) > KO For > Purchase GRN
Never key the lines by hand when a GRN exists. Go to the KO For tab, choose Purchase GRN, and pick the finalised receipt. Only finalised, not-fully-knocked-off documents appear in the list; a receipt that has already been invoiced has gone.
The lines come across with the received quantities — give them a couple of seconds to appear.
Now set the date again. The knock-off stamps today’s date on the invoice, over the supplier’s date you entered in Step 1, and nothing on the screen tells you it happened. Once the lines are in, go back to the header and put the supplier’s invoice date back. Skip this, and a supplier invoice dated 28 March that you knock off on 2 April posts in April: the purchase and its input-tax posting land in the wrong month, and the supplier’s statement disagrees with yours. If you add a second receipt by knocking it off later, check the date again after that one too.
This is where matching actually happens in BigLedger: it is a knock-off, not a scoring engine. There is no variance report and no tolerance check — the mismatch shows up as a difference between what is on your screen and what is on the supplier’s paper, and it is your job to notice.
If your company’s flow is order-to-invoice with no receipt document, choose Purchase Order on the same tab instead. If you need to look something up rather than knock it off, the Search Document panel on a saved draft searches purchase orders, GRNs and previous purchase invoices.
Watch out for: if the receipt is not in the list, check in order — is it finalised, is it for this supplier, and has someone already invoiced it? All three are common and all three look identical from here. If it passes all three and is still missing, the company’s Knock Off Configuration (Organisation > Company > Knock Off Configuration) has no enabled Purchase GRN → Purchase Invoice row, so the GRN’s FINAL created no queue rows — a one-off fix for your administrator.
Step 4: Check the invoice against the paper
Finance > Purchase Invoice (Internal) > (your draft) > Line Items
This is the step people skip, and it is the only real control on the whole flow. Compare three things:
Quantity. The lines came from the receipt, so they show what you actually received. If the supplier has billed 200 and you received 195, your screen says 195 and their paper says 200. Do not adjust the line to match their paper. Query it.
Price. The receipt carries the order’s price. If the supplier has billed RM 132 against an ordered RM 128, you will see RM 128 on screen and RM 132 on paper. A price increase may well be legitimate — but it should be agreed before it is posted, not after.
Tax. Check the tax code on each line and the tax total. A 6% SST line on RM 25,600 is RM 1,536. Finalising posts every tax line to your input-tax account whether or not the supplier’s paper is a valid tax invoice; BigLedger does not check that for you. SST gives most businesses no general credit for tax paid on purchases, so what that balance means for your return is a question for whoever prepares it, not something the posting settles.
For each line you can open Item Details, Pricing Details, Costing Details and Issue Link for the detail behind the numbers.
Anything that does not match: stop here. A draft invoice can be edited freely or discarded. A finalised one can only be voided — and voiding is refused while any document raised from it is active (a return, a debit or credit note, a conversion), and the VOID button disappears once your company is live on e-Invoice. Whatever the linked document is, the refusal reads The purchase invoice has already been returned.; the invoice’s Doc Link tab shows you which document is really in the way; void that one first. From then on the fix is an adjusting note, and the commonest case, an invoice finalised too high, takes a purchase debit note, which lowers what you owe (the direction trap is under Common mistakes). If the invoice was self-billed, that debit note is sent to MyInvois as a self-billed credit note: the e-Invoice name describes the invoice going down, the BigLedger name describes your ledger, and the mismatch is expected. Five minutes now against half a day later.
Next: Step 5: Attach the invoice and finalise.
What success looks like for this part
Before anything is finalised: the lines came across through KO For — from the goods received note, or from the purchase order if your company’s flow is order-to-invoice with no receipt document — not keyed by hand; the header date is the supplier’s invoice date again, checked after the last knock-off; and the quantity, price and tax on screen agree with the supplier’s paper — 200 units at RM 128 and RM 1,536 of SST in the example — or you have queried the difference and left the invoice in draft.
Common mistakes in this part
Keying the lines instead of using KO For. The invoice looks identical and posts identically — but the GRN stays open forever, the same goods can be invoiced twice, and nothing ties the bill to the receipt. Always come in through KO For or Search Document.
Adjusting the line to match the supplier’s paper. If they billed for more than you received, changing the quantity on the invoice makes the discrepancy disappear from your screen and appear in your stock count six weeks later. Query the invoice instead.
Finalising with a price you have not agreed. FINAL posts the ledger and the stock. Voiding is refused while any document raised from the invoice is active, and blocked entirely under e-Invoice; the remaining route is an adjusting document plus an explanation. If the invoice is too high, that is a purchase debit note, which lowers what you owe. A purchase credit note in BigLedger raises it, so it is the right document only when the invoice came in too low.
Expecting a variance report. There is no three-way matching engine, no tolerance band and no variance flag anywhere in BigLedger. The knock-off brings the received quantities across and that is the whole mechanism. The check is you, reading the screen against the paper.
Dating the invoice on the knock-off’s date instead of the supplier’s, and billing with the wrong invoice document for your receipt path, are on the front page’s list.
Related documentation
- Purchase Invoice (Internal) — the full applet reference: every tab, setting, GL rule and failure mode
- Purchase GRN (Internal) — the receipt this invoice knocks off
- Purchase Invoice No Stock In (Internal) — the money-only variant for the GRN Stock In path
- Goods Received Note Processing