Your suppliers are the half nobody counts — 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 tax-number project has been about customers. Across the tenants we measured, supplier records carry a tax number far less often than customer records do — and a supplier’s number is the one that fails loudly, because your own purchase document is the thing that gets rejected. GadgetSphere buys from about twelve hundred suppliers. Twelve minutes on why the supplier side behaves differently and which bulk route actually works.

Step 1 — Know why a supplier needs a number of its own

After this step you will stop thinking of tax numbers as a customer problem. When you self-bill — when you raise the document because the supplier cannot — BigLedger builds an e-invoice in which your supplier is the issuing party. Everything that identifies them comes off their supplier record: the tax number, the identity type and value, the identity number, the tax registration numbers, the industry classification and the business-activity description. On a customer sale a bad buyer number costs you a consolidated receipt. Here it costs you your own purchase document, and the exposure is yours rather than theirs.

Reference: Supplier — Self-billed e-Invoices and Peppol routing

Step 2 — Learn that a supplier record can save and still be unfit

After this step a clean save will stop reassuring you. The supplier E-Invoice tab has thirteen fields that must be filled before the record can be saved, and the tab is checked as a block, so a half-filled one keeps the whole supplier from saving. The tax number is not one of the thirteen. Neither is the e-Invoice identity value. Both are checked at submission instead, weeks later and by a different piece of the system. So a supplier record that saved cleanly, and that has been saved cleanly for two years, tells you nothing at all about whether it can carry a self-billed e-invoice.

Reference: Supplier — E-Invoice tab

Step 3 — Sort the blanks that divert from the blanks that go out wrong

After this step you will know which gaps are urgent. A missing tax number, identity type, identity value, identity number or business-activity description diverts the document, with the reason written against it in those words — annoying, visible, fixable. Two other blanks do something worse. A missing tax registration number or tourism-tax number is substituted with the letters N A, and a missing industry classification code with five zeros. Those never stop a submission. They go to the board looking complete and wrong, and you will not hear about them from BigLedger at all.

Reference: Supplier — Self-billed e-Invoices and Peppol routing

Step 4 — Use the bulk route that really does write tax numbers

After this step you will stop using the wrong screen for the job. The supplier applet’s own File Import recognises forty-one column names, and the e-Invoice tax identification number is one of them — so this, not the e-invoice bulk screen, is where a list of supplier tax numbers is actually loaded. Four columns are mandatory, column order does not matter, and Sample Format gives you a template in your chosen delimiter. Two rules to respect: a column name the importer does not recognise fails the entire file, and validation is all or nothing, so one bad row means no supplier is created at all.

Reference: Supplier — Bulk load and extract

Step 5 — Never fix suppliers by exporting and re-importing

After this step you will not delete the very data you set out to fix. The obvious method is to export your suppliers, edit the tax numbers in a spreadsheet and import the file back. It does not work, and it fails silently. The export writes only the core columns and the two address blocks. It omits the e-Invoice tax identification number, the self-billed flag, the tax registration and tourism-tax numbers, the classification code and the category code. Re-import that file and every one of those is quietly emptied on every supplier in it, with no warning and no error.

Reference: Supplier — Bulk load and extract

Step 6 — Expect nothing to check the number you just loaded

After this step your expectations will match the product. When a self-billed document is generated, the supplier tax number is taken as given — it is not put to the board first. Validation happens only in the separate TIN update and bulk-upload paths, and those are aimed at your customers. A wrong-but-present supplier number therefore travels all the way to LHDN and comes back as a rejection days later. One more thing worth knowing: the e-invoice bulk screen matches on any of four columns with no filter on what kind of entity it finds, so a supplier can be pulled into a customer campaign by a shared telephone number.

Reference: Supplier — Self-billed e-Invoices and Peppol routing

How the steps fit together

    flowchart TD
  s1["Step 1 — Know why a supplier needs a number of its own"]
  s2["Step 2 — Learn that a supplier record can save and still be unfit"]
  s3["Step 3 — Sort the blanks that divert from the blanks that go out wrong"]
  s4["Step 4 — Use the bulk route that really does write tax numbers"]
  s5["Step 5 — Never fix suppliers by exporting and re-importing"]
  s6["Step 6 — Expect nothing to check the number you just loaded"]
  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.

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