Proving a new company is live, and the four things that look like proof and are not — transcript

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

This presentation is for the person who has finished setting a company up and has to tell somebody it is done. In about ten minutes you will have a check that takes half a minute and a short list of the results that will otherwise let you say done when you are not.

Step 1 — Check the environment before anything else

After this step your check will start in the right place. Open the company, go to the E-Invoice tab, and read the LHDN Environment. It must say production. This goes first, not last, because every other test you are about to run passes exactly as convincingly against LHDN’s sandbox: the same statuses, the same unique identifier, the same QR code on the printout. If this field is wrong, nothing further you look at means anything, and the work to put it right grows by one document for every sale the company makes in the meantime.

Reference: MyInvois Setup Guide — What success looks like

Step 2 — Take one real sale all the way to Valid

After this step you will have tested the chain rather than the configuration. Pick an ordinary sale to a customer whose record you completed — a named buyer, local currency, nothing unusual — and finalise it. Then follow it: it should appear as an e-invoice, move to submitted, and come back Valid with a reference from LHDN and a QR code on the printable version. One document doing the whole journey tests the identity, the tax number, the token, the environment and the schedule in a single pass. Nothing else you can do in five minutes tests as much.

Reference: MyInvois Setup Guide — What success looks like

Step 3 — Read your own supplier block back

After this step you will have caught the errors that only show up once. On that Valid e-invoice, look at your own company’s details — the supplier side, not the customer’s. Right tax number, right registered address, right state, a contact number that is actually a number. This is the one block that is identical on every document the company will ever issue, so an error here is not one bad invoice, it is all of them, arriving together on the day somebody at LHDN or a large customer looks closely. It costs ten seconds now and is unpleasant to correct in volume later.

Reference: MyInvois Setup Guide — What success looks like

Step 4 — Learn the two Peppol results that prove nothing

After this step you will stop counting screens as evidence. A row in the Peppol waiting queue proves only that the document was finalised at a company with Peppol enabled — nothing checked the customer, the addresses or the identifiers before that row was written, so its presence tells you almost nothing. And a to-Peppol document with a sender and receiver on it proves the two default flags took, not that anything left the building. The delivery is only real when the transmission is in history and the person at the other end says the invoice arrived in their system. Until then you have tested three screens.

Reference: Peppol Configuration Guide — What success looks like

Step 5 — Learn the two LHDN results that prove nothing

After this step you will know the two false positives on the e-invoice side. Valid in the sandbox is the first, and it is the expensive one, because it is indistinguishable on every screen from the real thing. The second is quieter: a company that looks correct and whose documents are queued but never move. Configured and running are different facts. A tenant can have every field right and no scheduled job to act on any of it — that is the normal state for Peppol on a new tenant, where not one of the relevant jobs is created by default. A queue that is filling and never emptying is the symptom, and there is no error to go with it.

Reference: My Peppol Admin Applet — Before you can use it

Step 6 — Hand the check to somebody else

After this step the next company takes half the time. Write the check down as four lines and give it to whoever sets up the next one: the environment says production; one real sale reached Valid today; the supplier block on that e-invoice is correct; and, if Peppol is in scope, a named person at the trading partner has confirmed an arrival. Every line is something a person can see in seconds, and every line fails loudly when it fails. A group bringing three companies live runs the same four lines three times, and the third company is the one where the habit pays.

Reference: MyInvois Setup Guide — Common mistakes

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.

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