How your invoice was matched to the goods receipt — 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 a supplier looking at a purchase invoice inside a customer’s system and wanting to know what it was matched against. In about nine minutes you will be able to read the chain from the invoice back to the receipt and the order, and to tell a real gap from a perfectly ordinary one.

Step 1 — Know whose invoice you are reading

After this step you will read the screen correctly. The purchase invoice in the portal is not your invoice. It is your customer’s record of your invoice, keyed or imported into their books, and it appears to you only once they have finalised it. So the first check is the cheapest one and the one people skip: does their header carry your reference number, your date and your amount. If your invoice is not on the screen at all, it has not been entered, which is a different problem from a wrong figure and goes to a different person. Finalised also means committed: they are now expecting to pay it.

Reference: Purchase Invoice Supplier Access (Internal) — Overview

Step 2 — Open the Doc Link tab, which is the match

After this step you will know where the matching is recorded. Every one of these documents has a Doc Link tab with two halves, Copy From and Copy To. Copy From lists what this document was drawn out of. Copy To lists what has since been drawn out of it. On your customer’s purchase invoice, Copy From is where you see the goods received notes it was raised against, and on a goods received note Copy From shows the order it received against while Copy To shows the invoice that followed. That chain is the match, and reading it takes about ten seconds once you know it is there.

Reference: Purchase Invoice Supplier Access (Internal) — Document view

Step 3 — Understand that the link was made, not found

After this step you will know why the chain is reliable. Nothing searches for a match later. The link is written at the moment your customer draws one document out of another — their clerk opens the invoice, pulls in the goods received note, and the link and the quantity taken are recorded then and there. That is why it is trustworthy and also why it is all-or-nothing: a document keyed from scratch has no link, however obviously it corresponds to something. So a Doc Link tab is a record of how the document was made, not an opinion about what it relates to.

Reference: Purchase GRN Supplier Access (Internal) — Document view

Step 4 — Learn the three ordinary shapes

After this step an empty Copy From will stop looking like an error. Purchasing runs in three ordinary shapes. The full one is order, then goods received note, then invoice, and every step carries a link. The short one skips the receipt: the invoice is drawn straight off the order, which buyers do for services and for goods that need no counting. The shortest has neither, an invoice keyed on its own, which is normal for rent, utilities and one-off expenses. All three are legitimate and supported. So a purchase invoice with nothing in Copy From is most likely the third shape, not a lost receipt.

Reference: Direct Invoice Workflow — When to use this workflow

Step 5 — Do not read a receipt as stock, or an invoice as payment

After this step two common assumptions will stop costing you time. A goods received note in this system records that your customer says the goods arrived; it does not by itself move any stock or post anything to their accounts, because the stock movement is a separate document they raise afterwards. And the Payment tab on the invoice lists settlements they have recorded against it, alongside a Contra tab for offsets. An empty Payment tab means nothing has been recorded yet. It is not a refusal, it is not a dispute, and it is not a promise about when.

Reference: Standard Procurement Workflow — Four documents, and what each one actually does

Step 6 — Turn a disagreement into one sentence

After this step you will raise a problem in a form somebody can act on. Work the chain backwards and stop at the first document that disagrees with yours. If the invoice amount is wrong but the receipt quantity is right, it is a pricing question. If the receipt quantity is short, it is a delivery question and the next documents to watch for are a return and a credit note. If Copy From is empty on an invoice that should have come off a receipt, say so explicitly. Then quote their document number, their date and the item code — those are the three things their clerk can search on.

Reference: Purchase Invoice Supplier Access (Internal) — Document view

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: When it does not agree, and the matching you cannot see · Back to the series · Play this as a presentation