The traps, and proving the month — 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 your self-billed documents are flowing and you now have to live with them. Three things here are worth knowing before they happen, and one of them nearly cost a customer a hundred and twenty-nine perfectly good e-invoices. In about twelve minutes you will know all three, know how to correct a self-billed e-invoice that LHDN has already accepted, and be able to run a month-end check on this part of your books that is honest about what it cannot see.

Step 1 — Do not cancel the duplicate that is not one

After this step you will never destroy a valid e-invoice on the strength of a report that looked odd. Sales invoices and self-billed purchase invoices take their document numbers from two completely separate sequences, and both sequences start at the same value. So the same number genuinely exists twice at GadgetSphere — once on a sale, once on a purchase — and the submission listing does not show you which direction a document went. Two rows, one number, and an urge to cancel one of them. Check the document type on both rows first. One customer came within a single step of cancelling a hundred and twenty-nine valid e-invoices that way, and there was no duplicate at all.

Reference: E-Invoice Validation Rules & Troubleshooting — 4. The same sale looks like it is at LHDN twice

Step 2 — Expect the VOID button to disappear

After this step you will not raise a support ticket about a missing button. The moment a company’s e-invoice status is enabled, purchase invoices can no longer be voided from the applet at all — the button is simply not shown any more. On a refund note the rule is stated as a refusal rather than a hidden button: voiding a document whose self-billed flag is on comes back saying the document cannot be changed to void because e-invoice is enabled. This is not a fault. Once something may have been reported to the tax authority, quietly reversing it in your books is exactly what must not happen, so the correction has to go the other way.

Reference: Purchase Invoice (Internal) — Top action buttons

Step 3 — Correct a self-billed e-invoice the way LHDN allows

After this step you know your options and your deadline. You are the issuer of a self-billed e-invoice, so the issuer’s correction path is yours. Once LHDN has answered Valid, that document is a filed tax record, and you have seventy-two hours from the validation moment recorded on the record — not from the purchase date, and not from when you noticed — to cancel it and issue a corrected one. Past that window nothing can cancel it, and the correction is a credit note that references the original. Trying to edit and resubmit instead is refused outright on a header that is already Valid or already Submitted.

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

Step 4 — Know what self-billing does not do for you

After this step your expectations match the product. Self-billing reports a purchase to LHDN. It writes the e-invoice number and status back onto the purchase document and nothing else: no journal, no tax beyond what the document already carried. The one thing that does change a posting status is a cancellation approved as void original document. It does not match anything, because there is nothing incoming to match. And it gives you no way to reject a supplier’s e-invoice: there is no screen and no button for that anywhere in BigLedger, it happens on the MyInvois portal or on your supplier’s own buyer portal, and BigLedger will never learn that it happened. Self-billing is reporting, not reconciliation and not control.

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

Step 5 — Prove the month, and know the report’s limits

After this step you have a monthly check you can defend. Create the Discrepancies Report for the company and the month. Open its ERP Transaction Summary tab, which carries your own documents, including the purchase side and a line for everything that was skipped — read the skipped figure before anything else, because a skipped self-billed purchase is a purchase nobody reported. The IRB Audit Summary tab carries the e-invoice side per document type, with the cancelled amount beside each. Ignore the from-supplier column: it reads zero unless you receive documents over Peppol or by e-mail intake, and that zero is correct rather than a failure.

Reference: My E-Invoice Admin Applet — 8. Monthly Report → Discrepancies Report

Step 6 — Work the five reasons a month will not tally

After this step a gap is a worklist rather than a mystery. When your totals do not agree, the causes are few and they are always the same ones, so check them in order. Documents still sitting in a pool. Batch pool rows already marked processed and failed, which will not be swept into any consolidation. Documents voided without the skip flag set. Ghost documents that never entered the pipeline at all. And genuine duplicates. Clear the unmatched lists as you go. One limit to carry with you: this report compares your books against BigLedger’s own records, never against what LHDN holds, so anything keyed straight into the MyInvois portal is invisible to it.

Reference: My E-Invoice Admin Applet — Troubleshooting

How the steps fit together

    flowchart TD
  s1["Step 1 — Do not cancel the duplicate that is not one"]
  s2["Step 2 — Expect the VOID button to disappear"]
  s3["Step 3 — Correct a self-billed e-invoice the way LHDN allows"]
  s4["Step 4 — Know what self-billing does not do for you"]
  s5["Step 5 — Prove the month, and know the report's limits"]
  s6["Step 6 — Work the five reasons a month will not tally"]
  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.

Back to the series · Play this as a presentation