The registration the board has no number for — 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 when a customer hands you a business registration certificate and the automatic lookup still gives you nothing. It is the commonest surprise in tax-number work and it is not a fault. Eleven minutes on why an empty answer happens, what BigLedger does with the document afterwards, and the one band of sales where the usual fallback does not exist.

Step 1 — Understand what the automatic search is actually asking

After this step an empty result will stop looking like a failure. The search takes one thing to the board: a business registration number, with the identity type set to business registration number. It asks whether the board holds a tax number filed against that registration. Sometimes the board does not — the business is real, the certificate is real, and no tax number sits against that registration because the tax the business pays is filed somewhere else. BigLedger cannot tell that case apart from a mistyped number, and neither can the search. It gets an empty answer and it moves on.

Reference: My E-Invoice Admin Applet — 2 posting queue to irb or a pool cron e_invoice_generic_document_to_irb_processor

Step 2 — Learn that empty is not stuck

After this step you will stop hunting for held documents that are not held. A blank tax number is not an error state in BigLedger. The document simply fails the check that would have sent it out as a named e-invoice, and it takes the other road: into the Batch Pool, and out on the monthly consolidated run under the general public buyer, with everybody else’s counter receipts. Nothing waits for you, nothing times out, and nothing appears on a screen to be cleared. That is the design. It keeps the till moving and moves the correction to somebody with time to do it properly.

Reference: Pools and queues — How it behaves in BigLedger

Step 3 — Know the band of sales that fallback cannot rescue

After this step you will know which empty answers are urgent. Consolidation only takes the smaller sales. A sales invoice or cash bill of ten thousand ringgit or more is diverted to the Individual Pool instead, and it stays there until somebody supplies buyer details — moving it back into the batch is refused outright, with a message saying so. So for a large sale to a business whose registration has no number behind it, there is no quiet road. The document sits, nothing chases it, and there is no ageing alert on any pool. That is the one you telephone about.

Reference: My E-Invoice Admin Applet — Troubleshooting

Step 4 — Try the search by hand before you telephone anybody

After this step you will not ask a customer for something you could have found. Open the pool row and press Get TIN. It runs the same search the automatic route runs, by identity type and identity value, and it has no amount condition — so it works on the small sales the automatic route never touched. If it fills the field, you are done and nobody was troubled. If it comes back empty a second time, you have your answer: the board has nothing under that registration, and the number has to come from the customer. Two clicks separate a data problem from a conversation.

Reference: My E-Invoice Admin Applet — Fields

Step 5 — Ask while the customer is still in front of you

After this step your pool will stop growing. The cheapest moment to get a tax number is the moment of the sale, when the person who knows it is standing at your counter or on the telephone about the order. The most expensive moment is three weeks later, when the sale is a pool row, the contact has changed and the month is being closed. Nothing in BigLedger will remind you, because there is no ageing alert anywhere in e-invoicing. So make it a counter habit for business buyers: the number goes on the record when the order is taken, not when the e-invoice fails.

Reference: Customer Maintenance — Edit customer — E-Invoice

Step 6 — Record what you learned about that customer

After this step you will not repeat the same empty search every month. When the board has nothing under a registration, that fact is about the customer, not about the sale — it will be just as true next month. Put the number the customer gives you on the E-Invoice tab so the next document reads it, and leave the identity type as the registration number so your own records still show what kind of business it is. The point of fixing it once is that no later sale to that buyer ever reaches a pool for the same reason.

Reference: Customer Maintenance — Edit customer — E-Invoice

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: Invalid is three different things · Back to the series · Play this as a presentation