Two doors, and only one rings a bell — 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 keep GadgetSphere’s books and buyers have started asking for e-invoices in their own names. There are two completely different ways that request can arrive, they land in two different places, and only one of them will ever wait politely for you to notice. About nine minutes, and by the end you will know which of your screens is really the inbox.

Step 1 — Know what your buyer is actually asking for

After this step you will know what is at stake in a request that looks trivial. A shopper who paid at a GadgetSphere counter and gave the cashier nothing has a receipt and nothing else. Their purchase is waiting to be reported once a month inside a single consolidated e-invoice, with the buyer written down as General Public and every identity and address field fixed at a value nobody can type over. They are not asking you to reprint anything. They are asking you to pull their receipt out of that monthly document and report it on its own, with their name and tax number on it.

Reference: Consolidated e-invoices — Why it exists

Step 2 — Tell the two doors apart

After this step you will know which door a request came through before you touch it, which decides everything else. The first door is the customer portal: a buyer you gave a login to signs in, picks the account they are acting for, finds the receipt and supplies their details there. That is the door for corporate customers who buy from GadgetSphere Distribution every month. The second is a widget on the web store, open to anyone with a receipt and no account at all. That is the door for the walk-in shopper at a Klang Valley branch who went home and thought about it.

Reference: Storefront E-Invoice Request — Overview

Step 3 — Accept that the storefront door has no bell

After this step you will stop waiting for a message that is never sent. When a shopper completes the storefront form, the request goes straight into a queue processor and the processor does the work. There is no inbox of storefront requests. There is no approval step. Nothing e-mails you, nothing appears in a list of things to action, and no counter anywhere goes up by one. What actually happens is that a pool row quietly changes — the buyer’s name, identification and tax number are now on it — and a new submission-queue entry appears beside it. That is the whole of the notification you get.

Reference: Storefront E-Invoice Request — Lifecycle and effects

Step 4 — Find the requests that do wait for a person

After this step you will know where the other door’s traffic collects. In the admin applet, under Internal Submission, there is a screen called Portal Request that lists the requests buyers raised through the customer portal. Read it as a register rather than a worklist: it has no buttons of its own, so nothing is actioned there. The work happens where it always happens — on the pool row the request changed, using Save and Resubmit once the details are complete. Portal Request tells you a person asked and when. The pool tells you whether anything went out.

Reference: My E-Invoice Admin Applet — Screens and menus

Step 5 — Make the pools your inbox, on a schedule

After this step you will have a habit that closes the gap both doors leave. Because neither door raises an alert, the only reliable practice is to open the three pools on a fixed rhythm — daily during the month, and certainly before the consolidation runs — and look for rows that have grown a buyer since yesterday. Remember what each pool means. A Batch Pool full of receipts is a healthy retailer. An Individual Pool full of receipts is revenue nobody has reported yet, and a request that failed lands there looking exactly like one that was never made.

Reference: Pools and queues — What it is not

How the steps fit together

    flowchart TD
  s1["Step 1 — Know what your buyer is actually asking for"]
  s2["Step 2 — Tell the two doors apart"]
  s3["Step 3 — Accept that the storefront door has no bell"]
  s4["Step 4 — Find the requests that do wait for a person"]
  s5["Step 5 — Make the pools your inbox, on a schedule"]
  s1 --> s2
  s2 --> s3
  s3 --> s4
  s4 --> s5
  

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: What one buyer’s request does to your month · Back to the series · Play this as a presentation