After LHDN answers: the 72 hours, and what stays your job — 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 will be told, at some point, that an e-invoice is wrong. In about ten minutes you will know what the revenue board’s answer means, how long you have to undo it, which of the next steps the software does and which it leaves to you — and what nobody will tell you unless you go and look.

Step 1 — Read the verdict for what it is

After this step you will know which of three states a document is in. When BigLedger submits an e-invoice, its status becomes submitted, which means only that the revenue board is still deciding. Shortly after, it becomes valid or invalid. Valid is not an acknowledgement; it is the moment the document becomes a filed tax record, and from that moment you cannot edit it — BigLedger refuses even to resubmit it, and that refusal is the rule working rather than a fault. Invalid means it was refused and nothing was filed, which sounds worse and is much easier to deal with: you correct the data and send it again, with no window and no notes involved.

Reference: Validation and clearance — Why it exists

Step 2 — Start the clock from the right field

After this step you will never miscount the window. The rule is the revenue board’s: within seventy-two hours of validation the buyer may request that an e-invoice be rejected and the supplier may cancel it, and after that no cancellation is possible at all. BigLedger counts the same seventy-two hours from the validation date-time recorded on the e-invoice, held in universal time, which can read earlier than the portal appears to show you. So open the e-invoice, read that field, and add seventy-two hours to it. The common error is counting from the invoice date, which on a backdated or queued document can be days apart from validation — and the direction of that error is always against you.

Reference: Cancelling and Correcting a Validated E-Invoice — The one rule that decides everything

Step 3 — Know that nothing moves a request along for you

After this step you will staff the window rather than trusting it. A cancellation inside seventy-two hours is not one button. A request is raised, somebody has to approve it, and somebody has to process it — and no background job advances a request that is sitting there. That is worth saying twice, because the failure mode is silent and entirely typical: a request raised on a Friday afternoon, nobody with the approval role in on Monday, and the window closes with the request still reading in progress. If the person who normally does this is away, either arrange cover for the day or plan on the credit note route from the start.

Reference: Cancelling and Correcting a Validated E-Invoice — Common mistakes

Step 4 — Learn what the window closing actually changes

After this step you will know why the screen looks different on day four. Past seventy-two hours there is no cancellation; the correction is a new document that reverses the wrong one and references it — a credit note, a debit note or a refund note, depending on whether value is coming off, going on, or money is going back. The screen mirrors that: on a rejection request that is past the window, the list of things you can choose collapses to one option, new reversal document, which builds the reversing document, finalises it and creates its e-invoice, leaving the original valid and untouched. Talk to your accountant before you raise it. Usually your books are already right and it is only the tax record that is overstated.

Reference: Cancelling and Correcting a Validated E-Invoice — Step 6: Past 72 hours — issue a credit note instead

Step 5 — Hear about the rejection that never arrives

After this step you will know the one message that does not reach you. Your buyer can raise a rejection request on the revenue board’s own portal instead of through you, and today that rejection does not come back into BigLedger. Nothing in your queues changes, no report moves, and no notification appears. If a customer telephones to say they have rejected one of your e-invoices, treat the telephone call as the notification: go and look at the portal yourself and act on it here. Waiting for BigLedger to notice will spend the seventy-two hours you were told about in the last two steps, and the window does not reopen.

Reference: Cancelling and Correcting a Validated E-Invoice — What we cannot see for you

Step 6 — Build the monthly check, because nothing posts it to you

After this step you will know the shape of the routine that catches everything above. A queued e-invoice that is waiting and a queued e-invoice that is failing look identical on the listing; a document sitting at submitted looks the same whether the answer is due in minutes or nobody is asking any more. None of that surfaces on its own. The report that compares what you invoiced against what has an e-invoice record exists, and it is built the moment a person presses Create — the job that would produce it monthly and e-mail it is not one the scheduler can run and has never run on any customer’s system. So put it in the month-end list between the first and the seventh, while cancellation is still possible.

Reference: Understanding E-Invoice Statuses — What you cannot tell from the screen

How the steps fit together

    flowchart TD
  s1["Step 1 — Read the verdict for what it is"]
  s2["Step 2 — Start the clock from the right field"]
  s3["Step 3 — Know that nothing moves a request along for you"]
  s4["Step 4 — Learn what the window closing actually changes"]
  s5["Step 5 — Hear about the rejection that never arrives"]
  s6["Step 6 — Build the monthly check, because nothing posts it to you"]
  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.

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