Incoming supplier e-invoices — 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 run the books at GadgetSphere and someone has asked you to prove that every purchase in the books has a validated supplier e-invoice behind it. In about twelve minutes you will learn which supplier e-invoices BigLedger can show you and which it never will, how to build a worklist of the purchases that need one, how to pair the few that arrive electronically, and how to check the rest by hand and clear them so the list shrinks instead of growing. Budget fifteen minutes a month for the routine afterwards.

Step 1 — Set your expectations before you open anything

After this step you will not spend a month waiting for a screen to fill. BigLedger does not show you the e-invoices your suppliers filed with the Inland Revenue Board, LHDN. Incoming matching works only for documents that reach BigLedger through a delivery channel, which today means the PEPPOL network or the optical-character-recognition e-mail intake. A supplier who submitted to MyInvois and sent you an ordinary PDF, which is most of them, has left nothing in BigLedger to match. There is a screen, External Reception, then From IRB E-Invoice, that is meant to show the e-invoices LHDN holds with your company as the buyer. It is empty, and no setup on your side will fill it; what MyInvois returns stops in an internal staging area and never reaches the screen. GadgetSphere buys from around 1,200 suppliers, and about 20 authorised distributors carry most of the spend. That shape is what makes the routine below workable.

Reference: My E-Invoice Admin Applet — 7. Incoming e-invoices and reconciliation

Step 2 — Build the list of purchases that should have one

After this step you have an exportable worklist of purchases that ought to have a validated supplier e-invoice behind them. Open the My E-Invoice Admin Applet, go to Reconciliation (Purchase), then PD Matching Q. BigLedger writes a row here when you finalise a purchase document, but only when four things are all true: the company has e-invoicing switched on, the document is a purchase invoice, credit note, debit note, refund note or return, it is not flagged self-billed, and the supplier has a tax number on their record. Each is a silent exclusion. Each row shows the document number, a short code for its type, the company, the supplier, the date and the amount. Press Export and you have the month’s list. If a regular distributor is missing from it, check the supplier record before you chase the supplier: a supplier with no tax number on file never generates a row, and nothing tells you so.

Reference: Incoming Supplier E-Invoices — Step 1: See which purchases BigLedger expects a supplier e-invoice for

Step 3 — See what has actually arrived

After this step you know what BigLedger has received from suppliers, and what it never will. Go to Reconciliation (Purchase), then Inc. E-Invoice Match Q. This is the list of supplier documents BigLedger holds and can pair with your purchases. Its Match Source column tells you how each one arrived: PEPPOL, meaning the supplier sent it over the network and it landed through your access point, or EMAIL, meaning the supplier e-mailed it and the OCR intake read it into a document. Those are the only two sources. For GadgetSphere, a handful of the large distributors may deliver this way; the rental, utility and marketing suppliers almost certainly do not. Open External Reception, then From IRB E-Invoice, once, so that you have seen it empty, and then stop going back. An empty screen there is not evidence that a supplier failed to e-invoice. It is evidence of nothing at all.

Reference: Incoming Supplier E-Invoices — Step 2: See what has actually arrived

Step 4 — Pair a supplier document that did arrive

After this step a supplier document that reached BigLedger is recorded as matched to the purchase you booked for it. Only do this if the last step showed rows. The fast way is Auto Match, on either matching-queue screen. BigLedger looks for a purchase document where four values agree exactly with the incoming one: the supplier’s identity number, the reference number, the amount and the document date. There is no tolerance and no partial match, which is why Auto Match usually finds nothing; a purchase keyed from paperwork rarely carries the supplier’s reference character for character, and one sen of rounding is enough to miss. The reliable way is by hand. Open the row in PD Matching Q., go to the Match Incoming Doc tab, press the plus button, select the supplier’s document, and press Match. The pair moves to Matched History, and Pushback to Queues undoes it. Matching posts nothing, changes no status and touches no ledger.

Reference: Incoming Supplier E-Invoices — Step 3: Pair a supplier document with your purchase document

Step 5 — Check the rest by hand and clear them off the list

After this step every purchase above your review threshold has a validated supplier e-invoice on file, and the worklist has shrunk. This is where the real work is. Your supplier’s validated e-invoice reaches you the way any invoice does: by e-mail, from their portal, or with the goods. What makes it validated is that it carries an LHDN identifier and a QR code; if those are missing, LHDN has not cleared it, whatever the covering note says. For each purchase on your export, check four things against the supplier’s document. The buyer is you: GadgetSphere buys through three companies, and a distributor billing the retail company while e-invoicing the distribution company is common and expensive. The amount agrees. The date falls in the period you are closing. The supplier’s tax number matches your record. File the document with the purchase, then select the row in PD Matching Q. and press Push to Unmatched History. Pushback restores it if you slip.

Reference: Incoming Supplier E-Invoices — Step 4: Check the rest by hand — and clear them off the list

Step 6 — Self-bill when the obligation is yours

After this step you know what to do when a supplier will not produce an e-invoice at all. For certain transactions LHDN puts the obligation on the buyer, and in BigLedger those are ordinary purchase documents flagged as self-billed. They travel through exactly the same pipeline as your sales e-invoices, with the roles swapped: your company is the buyer and your supplier is the issuer of record. Three things follow. A self-billed purchase never appears in PD Matching Q., by design, because there is nothing incoming to pair it with. You watch it on the purchase document’s own E-Invoice tab, where Progress shows it moving through the posting queue, the pool, the submission queue and LHDN. And a self-billed line usually comes from an expense account with no item classification to inherit, so a blank classification goes out as 022, Others. Which transactions you must self-bill is LHDN’s rule, not BigLedger’s; confirm your cases against the current guideline first.

Reference: Incoming Supplier E-Invoices — Step 5: When the supplier will not issue one

Step 7 — Know that you cannot reject a supplier’s e-invoice here

After this step you will not look for a button that does not exist. LHDN gives you, as buyer, 72 hours from validation to reject a supplier’s e-invoice, but there is no screen and no button for it anywhere in BigLedger. The Request for Rejection button you know from earlier lessons belongs to the other side of the relationship, where your buyers reject your e-invoices. If you need to reject a supplier’s document, it happens on the MyInvois portal or on the supplier’s own buyer portal, and BigLedger will not know it happened; nothing in the matching queues changes. Two last things for month-end. A row that waits in a matching queue forever is normal, not a fault; a matching queue is not a submission queue. And on the Discrepancies Report the From Supplier (Matched) column reads zero unless suppliers deliver over PEPPOL or e-mail. That zero is supposed to be there. Reconcile from the other columns.

Reference: Incoming Supplier E-Invoices — Step 6: Know what month-end can and cannot prove

How the steps fit together

    flowchart TD
  s1["Step 1 — Set your expectations before you open anything"]
  s2["Step 2 — Build the list of purchases that should have one"]
  s3["Step 3 — See what has actually arrived"]
  s4["Step 4 — Pair a supplier document that did arrive"]
  s5["Step 5 — Check the rest by hand and clear them off the list"]
  s6["Step 6 — Self-bill when the obligation is yours"]
  s7["Step 7 — Know that you cannot reject a supplier's e-invoice here"]
  s1 --> s2
  s2 --> s3
  s3 --> s4
  s4 --> s5
  s5 --> s6
  s6 --> s7
  

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: Reconcile a month with corrections in it · Back to the series · Play this as a presentation