Best Practices

These follow from the mechanics on Core concepts. Where a control you might expect does not exist, that is said plainly rather than worked around.

1. Decide the receiving pair once, write it down, and hide the other applets

Purchase Order → GRN → Invoice books the stock, or Purchase Order → GRN Stock In books the stock → No Stock In invoice books the money. One pair for the company.

Mixing them double-counts or never counts, and it does it silently: both documents finalise, both look right, and the next stock take finds the difference months later. The cheapest guard is administrative — give the two applets of the pair you did not choose to nobody.

2. Always knock off, and treat the knock-off as the check

Nothing in BigLedger compares an invoice with an order. What it does is put the order’s or the receipt’s real lines on the invoice screen when you knock them off. Make knock-off a house rule — never key an invoice from scratch when a receipt exists — and make the comparison with the supplier’s paper an explicit step before FINAL. A draft invoice with a wrong price is thrown away in seconds; a finalised one is a void (if e-Invoice is not yet enabled) or a debit note.

Agree the tolerance as a policy — “query anything over 1% on price” — and write it down. The system will not hold it for you.

3. Control with the finalise permission, because approval will not

The approval engine covers purchase orders and requisitions only, is off until configured, and when it completes it sets FINAL; it never blocks a manual FINAL while a request is pending. There is no approval at all on receipts, invoices, payments, returns or notes.

So four rights are worth deciding by name rather than by role template:

Separate the person who orders from the person who receives from the person who books the bill. The chain records who did what; it does not stop one person doing all three.

4. Receive only what you are willing to be billed for

A quantity on a finalised GRN is what the invoice will knock off. Damaged units received “to sort out later” become units you pay for. Leave them out of the GRN — they stay in the order’s open queue — and let the supplier replace them or credit them. If they have already been invoiced, the route back is a Purchase Return against that invoice; while the return stands, the invoice cannot be voided (void the return first).

5. Read the note names the way the ledger reads them

A Purchase Debit Note lowers what you owe; a Purchase Credit Note raises it, posting on the same side as an invoice. This is the reverse of the supplier’s naming, and it is the most common adjustment keyed backwards. If the supplier’s balance moved the wrong way after FINAL, that is the cause — and the fix is the other note, not a void.

6. Watch the open queue weekly, and CLOSE dead orders

The Purchase Order Queue is every committed line not yet received or invoiced. Lines that a supplier will never deliver sit there indefinitely and inflate the available quantity in Stock Availability, because open purchase orders push availability up. CLOSE the order — it zeroes the open quantities and removes the queue rows — and the figures come right. VOID is for an order that should never have existed; the two are not interchangeable and neither is undone.

7. Map every default GL code before the first document that needs it

The purchase journal resolves against company defaults — CREDITOR, PURCHASE, INPUT_TAX, and for the Stock In pair INVENTORY_NOT_INVOICED and CREDITOR_NOT_INVOICED, for consignment CONSIGNMENT_STOCK and CONSIGNMENT_LIABILITY. A missing code fails an invoice at FINAL, which is loud; on a GRN Stock In it lets the document go FINAL with the stock posted and no journal, which is quiet. Map them all at implementation, not one failure at a time.

8. One payment line per real bank movement

A payment voucher writes one cashbook transaction per payment line, and those lines are what Bank Reconciliation ticks off against the statement. Three transfers on one line will match nothing. Enter them as three lines.

9. Do not lean on the supplier’s credit limit

It is stored, listed and uploadable, and nothing in the backend reads it. The credit-availability service is advisory and sales-only; the blacklist blocks four sales document types. If a supplier limit matters, it is a rule for the buyer, and the finalise permission on the order is where it lives.

10. Agree the consignment price before keying the GRN

A consignment GRN enters the moving-average cost pool at the document’s amount. Keyed at RM 0 while the price is negotiated, it pulls the item’s average cost down for everything in stock, and the later billing pushes it back up. Key it at the agreed reference price, or accept that the average is wrong until then.

11. Look at Doc Link before you void anything

A GRN that an invoice has already knocked off refuses to void, and the message lists the blocking documents by type and number — the same rule holds for every document another one was raised from, so a billed consignment GRN refuses until the billing is voided first. Voiding the invoice reopens the receipt’s lines. Open the document’s Doc Link tab before you press VOID: it tells you which documents have to be voided first, last one first, and whether you really mean to unwind all of them.

12. Three reconciliations worth doing