Pick the level, and know what it costs — transcript

Play this as a presentation — one slide per step, with the same narration. Every word of every step is on this page.

This lesson is for you if you have decided some GadgetSphere sales are not yours to report and now have to choose where to say so. The same flag sits at three levels and the three are wildly different in blast radius. About eleven minutes, and the aim is that you pick the narrowest level that does the job, and leave a note saying why.

Step 1 — Skip one document when one document is the exception

After this step you will know the safest of the three and its one limitation. On any of the three pools you can skip a single row, which deletes the pool row and marks that document skipped. Use it for the genuine one-off: an order that turned out to be somebody else’s to report. It is not a way to get rid of a sale that did not happen. Skipping stops the e-invoice and nothing else, so the revenue, the stock and the receivable stay exactly where finalising put them; a sale abandoned or raised in error still has to be corrected in your books, and that is a decision for whoever owns them. It is precise and it catches nothing you did not choose. Its limitation is obvious — it is one row at a time, and somebody has to notice each one before the consolidation sweeps it.

Reference: My E-Invoice Admin Applet — 3. Pools — what the buttons do

Step 2 — Skip a customer when the relationship is the exception

After this step you will use the customer flag for what it is for. On a customer’s E-Invoice tab, beside their identity, tax number and address, there is a skip flag. Setting it excludes every future document raised for that customer, which is right when the relationship itself is the reason — a partner who invoices the end buyer directly. Do not reach for it just because a customer is another GadgetSphere company: being related is not the same as somebody else issuing the e-invoice. The same tick on a supplier record stops self-billed e-invoices for that supplier, because the flag is read from whichever trading party the document names. Be careful with it for a retail customer record that your tills fall back on, because that single record can carry a great deal of a branch’s daily takings.

Reference: Customer Maintenance — Edit customer

Step 3 — Skip a branch only when the whole shop is the exception

After this step you will treat the branch flag with the respect it needs. One tick on one branch takes every document that branch will ever finalise out of e-invoicing, self-billed purchases included, while the branch carries on trading exactly as before — nothing in its sales, stock or ledger changes to show it. That is correct and useful for a channel where the platform reports the sale, and it is a serious accident anywhere else, because the first symptom is a month-end report that quietly shows a whole shop as unreported. Never set it on a branch that also takes ordinary retail sales.

Reference: Organization — Branch Details, Pick Pack, Extension and Marketplace

Step 4 — Recognise the design the branch flag was built for

After this step you will see why this is a feature and not an oversight. A branch record carries marketplace fields as well as its address, so a selling channel whose orders arrive from an outside platform rather than over a counter can be a branch of its own. If that platform issues the e-invoice for every order of the channel — confirmed with them, not assumed — the correct setting is one flag on one record — not a flag on eighty thousand order documents, and not a flag on every buyer. Modelling the channel as its own branch is what makes the one tick safe.

Reference: Organization — Branch — Details, Address and Marketplace

Step 5 — Audit all three before you trust any of them

After this step you will have a way to see the flag you did not set. Because the three combine, the reliable check is the outcome rather than the settings: run your monthly report and open the documents behind its skipped documents line before you read anything else. Read the list, not the total — the total adds purchases, returns and credit notes in with your sales, and counts only documents in your own currency. Any sales document on that list that you did not decide to skip means something upstream is skipping for you. Then work backwards — which branch, which customer — rather than reading three screens hoping to spot a tick. The list is the instrument; the tick boxes are just where it comes from.

Reference: E-Invoice Submission Mechanics — The discrepancy report: what “missing” means

Step 6 — Write the reason down, because the tick outlives it

After this step you will have saved your successor a bad afternoon. These flags are typically set once, during a migration or when a new channel opens, by somebody who had a perfectly good reason and is no longer in the room. A year later the flag is still there and the reason is not, and nobody dares clear it because nobody knows what it was for. Put the reason in a free-text field on that record where the next person will see it, and in whatever your finance team treats as its configuration log, on the same day you set it.

Reference: Organization — What breaks elsewhere when something here is wrong

How the steps fit together

    flowchart TD
  s1["Step 1 — Skip one document when one document is the exception"]
  s2["Step 2 — Skip a customer when the relationship is the exception"]
  s3["Step 3 — Skip a branch only when the whole shop is the exception"]
  s4["Step 4 — Recognise the design the branch flag was built for"]
  s5["Step 5 — Audit all three before you trust any of them"]
  s6["Step 6 — Write the reason down, because the tick outlives it"]
  s1 --> s2
  s2 --> s3
  s3 --> s4
  s4 --> s5
  s5 --> s6
  

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: What happens behind the scene when you skip · Back to the series · Play this as a presentation