Set the supplier up so it works — 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 have a GadgetSphere supplier you must self-bill and want the e-invoice to build itself from now on. Almost everything that goes wrong later is decided here, on one tab; budget about ten minutes of typing per supplier. In about twelve minutes you will know what that tab wants, what LHDN will accept in each identity field, what a foreign vendor gets instead of a real tax number, and the one shortcut that quietly destroys the lot.

Step 1 — Fill the E-Invoice tab as one block

After this step the supplier record is complete or it will not save, which is exactly what you want. The supplier’s E-Invoice tab is where the issuer half of every self-billed document comes from: tax identification number, identity type and value, identity number, service tax number, tourism tax number, industry classification code and business-activity description, plus name, contact number, email and a full address. Thirteen of those fields carry a required validator, and the tab is checked as a single block, so a half-filled tab stops the whole supplier record from saving. Two of the important ones are not on that required list, though: the tax identification number and the identity value. A record saves perfectly happily without them and is diverted later, at submission, which is what the next lesson is entirely about.

Reference: Supplier — E-Invoice tab

Step 2 — Choose the identity type LHDN will accept

After this step you will not create a supplier that rejects on its first document. The identity type has four values, and only one is right for each kind of supplier. A Malaysian company gets its business registration number. A Malaysian individual — a local agent, say — gets a national identity number, twelve digits with no hyphens. An individual who is not Malaysian gets a passport, never a national identity number: that swap is a common cause of the invalid-identity rejection, along with hyphens in a national identity number and a registration number keyed into the identity field. Read the passport rule as a rule about people rather than about foreignness. Your Singapore and Hong Kong distributors are companies, not individuals, so they take a business registration number too — the one their own home country issued them.

Reference: My E-Invoice Admin Applet — Fields

Step 3 — Give a foreign supplier the general tax number

After this step your Singapore and Hong Kong distributors carry the right tax number. When a foreign supplier has no Malaysian tax identification number — which is the usual case — LHDN publishes one to use instead. For a foreign supplier on a self-billed purchase it is the general number ending in thirty. Do not reach for one of the others: the one ending in ten is for the local general public, the one ending in twenty is for foreign buyers on the sales side, and the one ending in forty is for government. They are not interchangeable, and using the wrong one is a content rejection after the document has already gone. Everything else on the tab still has to be filled in properly.

Reference: E-Invoice Validation Rules & Troubleshooting — General TINs — when you don’t have the buyer’s TIN

Step 4 — Understand that nothing checks the number you typed

After this step you will not trust a saved record as evidence that it is right. The tax identification number you key on the supplier is not verified against LHDN at the moment a self-billed document is generated. Verification only happens in the separate tax-number update and bulk-upload flows, so a number that is present but wrong sails through every BigLedger check and comes back as a rejection after submission. There is one automatic exception, and it works in your favour: on a document of ten thousand or more where the identity type is a business registration number and the tax number is blank, the processor looks the number up at LHDN and writes it back onto the supplier for you.

Reference: Supplier — Self-billed e-Invoices and Peppol routing

Step 5 — Never bulk-edit suppliers through export and import

After this step you will not lose a month of setup in one afternoon. The temptation, with a few hundred suppliers to fix, is to export the list, edit it in a spreadsheet and import it back. Do not. The supplier export writes only the core columns plus the billing and shipping blocks. It leaves out the e-invoice tax number, the self-billed flag, the service tax number, the tourism-tax number, the industry classification code and the supplier category. The exported file then re-imports without a single complaint and silently blanks every one of them. If you need to load e-invoice details in bulk, build the file from the sample template, which does carry those columns.

Reference: Supplier — Bulk load and extract

Step 6 — Set up a person the same way, on the employee record

After this step you know where to go when the party you self-bill is a member of staff rather than a company. An employee in BigLedger is an entity record like a supplier, and it carries the same E-Invoice tab: a self-billed switch, name, identity type and number, tax identification number, contact number and email, service tax and tourism-tax numbers, industry code and business-activity description, and a full address. Those fields supply the party details on a self-billed e-invoice exactly as the supplier’s do. The identity rules do not change either — a Malaysian member of staff is twelve digits with no hyphens, and one who is not Malaysian is a passport, because an employee is always an individual.

Reference: Employee Maintenance — Edit — other tabs

How the steps fit together

    flowchart TD
  s1["Step 1 — Fill the E-Invoice tab as one block"]
  s2["Step 2 — Choose the identity type LHDN will accept"]
  s3["Step 3 — Give a foreign supplier the general tax number"]
  s4["Step 4 — Understand that nothing checks the number you typed"]
  s5["Step 5 — Never bulk-edit suppliers through export and import"]
  s6["Step 6 — Set up a person the same way, on the employee record"]
  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.

Next: The blanks that divert it, and the blanks that let it go out wrong · Back to the series · Play this as a presentation