Check the rest yourself, and clear the list — 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 you now understand that most of your suppliers will never appear on the incoming screen. This is the work that actually closes the question. About thirteen minutes. You will learn what to look for on a supplier’s document, what to do with it afterwards, how to clear the row so next month starts clean, and how to spot the purchases where the e-invoice was always going to be yours to issue.

Step 1 — Recognise a validated supplier e-invoice when you see one

After this step you can tell a tax record from a piece of paper. Your supplier’s validated e-invoice arrives the way any invoice does: by e-mail, from their own portal, or in the box with the goods. What makes it a validated e-invoice rather than an ordinary invoice is that it carries an identifier issued by the Inland Revenue Board and a QR code. That is the whole test. If those two things are not on the document, the board has not cleared it, whatever the covering note or the sender says about compliance. A PDF that has been titled e-invoice by somebody’s accounts department is not evidence of anything.

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

Step 2 — Run the four checks against your own record

After this step you know what you are comparing. Take the month’s list out of the grid’s tool panel, as in lesson two, and for each purchase you review check four things on the supplier’s document. The buyer must be the right one of your companies, with the right name and tax number. The amount must agree with the purchase invoice you booked. The document date must fall inside the period you are closing, because a supplier who e-invoices late lands their document in a different month from your purchase. And the supplier tax number on the document must match the one on your supplier record — where the two differ, yours is usually the stale one, so correct yours.

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

Step 3 — Watch the trap that only groups have

After this step you can catch the expensive one. GadgetSphere buys through three legal entities: the retail company, the online company and the distribution company. A distributor who bills the retail company but e-invoices the distribution company has produced a document that looks entirely correct until somebody reads the buyer block. It is common, and it is expensive, because the wrong entity has claimed the purchase while the right one has nothing to show. When you open a supplier’s document, read the buyer name and buyer tax number before you read anything else, and check them against the company on your own purchase row rather than against the company you happen to be working in.

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

Step 4 — File it, because BigLedger will not

After this step your evidence exists somewhere an auditor can reach. The reconciliation you have been working stores nothing: it pairs records, and the supplier’s actual document — the PDF with the board’s identifier and the QR code on it — is held nowhere in it. So file that document with the purchase paperwork exactly the way you file a delivery order, under the purchase document number so the two are found together. There is one exception, and lesson six covers it: if you upload a supplier’s invoice into AP Automation, the applet keeps what its optical character recognition read on a read-only screen. Decide your filing convention once, for all three companies, before the first month.

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

Step 5 — Clear the row so the list shrinks

After this step your queue becomes a worklist instead of a growing pile. Select the purchase row in PD Matching Q. and press Push to Unmatched History. That is precisely what the button means: I have dealt with this one, and it is not waiting for an electronic counterpart. The row parks in Unmatched PD Hist., and if you clear something by mistake, Pushback to PD Matching Queue brings it back. Used this way, what is left in PD Matching Q. at any moment is exactly what you have not yet reviewed. Used any other way, the queue only ever grows, and by March nobody opens it.

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

Step 6 — Set a review threshold you can defend

After this step you have a routine that survives a busy month. You are not going to open twelve hundred supplier relationships every month, and nobody expects you to. Pick an amount above which every purchase gets the four checks and a filed document, and spot-check below it. The month-end test is then answerable in half a minute: PD Matching Q. holds only what you have not yet reviewed, every supplier you expected to see is on the list, and every purchase above your threshold has its supplier e-invoice on file. Write the threshold down somewhere, because the value of the routine is that it is the same threshold every month.

Reference: Incoming Supplier E-Invoices — What success looks like

Step 7 — Know the purchases where the e-invoice is yours

For some purchases, Malaysian tax rules put the reporting obligation on the buyer rather than the seller — so the e-invoice for something you bought has to be issued by you. That is a self-billed e-invoice. In BigLedger it is not a separate applet and not a separate screen: it is an ordinary purchase document with a flag set on it. Once that flag is on, the document travels the same pipeline your sales e-invoices travel, with the two parties swapped. Your own company’s identity becomes the buyer block, and your supplier’s record becomes the issuer block. Which purchases must be self-billed is LHDN’s rule, not BigLedger’s, so confirm your own cases against the current guideline before you flag anybody.

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

Step 8 — Expect a flagged supplier to be absent from this list

After this step you will stop chasing a document that was never coming. A self-billed purchase document never appears in the Purchase Doc Matching Queue at all, and that is deliberate: you are the party issuing the e-invoice, so there is nothing incoming to pair it with. So a supplier you have flagged for self-billing is a supplier you should expect to be missing from this reconciliation entirely, and their absence is not the tax-number problem from lesson two. You watch those purchases somewhere else — on the purchase document’s own E-Invoice tab, where the submission details and the progress through the pipeline are shown.

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

How the steps fit together

    flowchart TD
  s1["Step 1 — Recognise a validated supplier e-invoice when you see one"]
  s2["Step 2 — Run the four checks against your own record"]
  s3["Step 3 — Watch the trap that only groups have"]
  s4["Step 4 — File it, because BigLedger will not"]
  s5["Step 5 — Clear the row so the list shrinks"]
  s6["Step 6 — Set a review threshold you can defend"]
  s7["Step 7 — Know the purchases where the e-invoice is yours"]
  s8["Step 8 — Expect a flagged supplier to be absent from this list"]
  s1 --> s2
  s2 --> s3
  s3 --> s4
  s4 --> s5
  s5 --> s6
  s6 --> s7
  s7 --> s8
  

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: Which console your supplier’s invoice is in · Back to the series · Play this as a presentation