Create the company, and what comes with it — 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 the chart exists and the Create Company screen is open. It is a short screen and an expensive one to get wrong, because some of these fields are painful to change afterwards and one of them decides whether an entire month of invoices ever reaches LHDN. Twelve minutes.

Step 1 — Create the company, and get the code right first time

After this step GadgetSphere Sdn Bhd exists. Create Company has two tabs, Details and Address, and asks for the company code, the name, the registration number, the currency and the chart you settled in the last lesson. Use a short code you will be happy reading on document numbers and permission set names for years — GadgetSphere uses GS, with GSO and GSD waiting for the online and distribution companies later. Codes are unique across the tenant, and on the edit screen the field is read-only to anyone below owner or administrator rank. Treat the code as permanent. An owner or an administrator can in fact edit it, and the backend accepts a unique replacement — but document numbers and permission-set names already carry the old one, so changing it is a migration in everything but name.

Reference: Organization — Screens and menus

Step 2 — See the three records and one event BigLedger just created for you

After this step you will know what you no longer have to do by hand. Saving the company runs one transaction that also creates three records and fires one event. It creates a corporate entity for the company, unless you supplied one. It creates the company’s primary ledger, in the company’s currency. It creates the stock-in-transit location that stock transfers use as a holding place between branches, and which the Stock Transfer applet then keeps out of its destination picker so nobody sends goods into it by accident. And it fires a company-created webhook for anything you have integrated. None of that needs your attention. It is worth knowing it happened, because you will meet all three later and wonder who made them.

Reference: Organization — Lifecycle and effects

Step 3 — See the four it did not create

After this step you will know exactly what is still missing, which is the rest of this course. Creating a company does not create its default GL codes, so nothing it ever finalises will post until lesson six. It does not create a branch, so no document can be raised against it yet. It does not create any knock-off rows, so no document will be able to find the one before it. And it does not create a cashbook, so no money can move. That is four silent gaps in a record that looks complete and saved. None of them will produce an error today.

Reference: Organization — Lifecycle and effects

Step 4 — Set the currency knowing what it fixes

After this step the company’s base currency is a decision rather than a default. The currency you pick becomes the base currency of the primary ledger that was just created for GadgetSphere, and the Forex applet filters its document drop-down by it, so a currency pair you later need will simply not appear if the base is wrong. GadgetSphere runs in ringgit and buys some stock in US dollars from regional distributors, which is the ordinary shape: base currency ringgit, foreign currency handled through forex rates and the two forex mappings you will meet in lesson six. Get the base right now; it is not a field you want to revisit once a ledger has entries.

Reference: Organization — Company Details tab

Step 5 — Set the timezone, because blank is not neutral

After this step your bank reconciliation windows and your report rows will land on the right day. Timezone appears only once the company is saved and reopened, on the Details tab, which is exactly why it gets missed. Leave it blank and the platform falls back through the tenant setting to Malaysian time. That is usually right and occasionally wrong, and when it is wrong the symptom is maddening: bank statement windows and report rows that are a day out, with no error anywhere. The branch carries its own timezone too, but for these consumers the company value is the one that decides, so set this one. Two minutes now, and it reaches bank reconciliation and every scheduled report. Marketplace date windows are the exception: they read the branch’s own timezone first, which is lesson four.

Reference: Organization — Company Details tab

Step 6 — Set the default sales and purchase tax codes

After this step you will know where the company’s tax defaults live and why you cannot fill them in yet. The company’s Tax tab has a Sales side and a Purchase side, each taking a default tax code and a flag for whether prices include the tax. Those two choices are pre-filled onto every new sales and purchase document of the company, and anyone raising a document can override them line by line. That is the point and also the risk: a wrong default is never rejected, it is simply carried quietly onto thousands of documents until somebody notices the tax column. GadgetSphere is registered for service tax, so its sales default will be its six per cent output code. You cannot pick it today, because no tax code exists yet: note the tab, and lesson seven fills it in as part of creating the codes.

Reference: Organization — Company Tax tab

Step 7 — Leave e-invoicing switched off until you have tested

After this step you will not lose a month of e-invoices to a switch. A new company is created with E-Invoice Status disabled, and that is the right state while you are testing. A document is queued for LHDN only when it is final and its company is enabled — and enabling the company later does not go back and queue what was already finalised. So the failure mode is a whole period of invoices that simply never appear in the e-invoice queue, with no error raised anywhere, because they were finalised while the switch was off. Finish this course, post the test invoice in lesson eight, void it, and only then switch e-invoicing on and work through the e-invoice setup course.

Reference: Organization — Company E-Invoice tab

Step 8 — Know what closing a company does, and what deleting does not

After this step you will treat both buttons with respect. Setting a company’s status to closed asks you to confirm, and then closes every branch and every location underneath it in the same action. That is usually what you want when a legal entity is wound up, and it is a genuine shock when somebody sets a status to tidy a listing. Deleting is quieter still: every delete in this applet is a soft delete, and no validator checks whether documents reference the record. The row stops appearing in pickers, its documents keep pointing at it, and nothing tells anyone. Correct a mistake by editing the record, not by deleting it and starting again.

Reference: Organization — Lifecycle and effects

How the steps fit together

    flowchart TD
  s1["Step 1 — Create the company, and get the code right first time"]
  s2["Step 2 — See the three records and one event BigLedger just created for you"]
  s3["Step 3 — See the four it did not create"]
  s4["Step 4 — Set the currency knowing what it fixes"]
  s5["Step 5 — Set the timezone, because blank is not neutral"]
  s6["Step 6 — Set the default sales and purchase tax codes"]
  s7["Step 7 — Leave e-invoicing switched off until you have tested"]
  s8["Step 8 — Know what closing a company does, and what deleting does not"]
  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: Branches, and the location your stock lands in · Back to the series · Play this as a presentation