Creating invoices

Invoices are a different kind of object to the ones that we have handled previously in the P2P process, since they are not created by us as administrators, but rather by our business partners directly in the PIC. To start off the process, we will look at the perspective of a business partner.

When analyzing the purchase order items of our active order, we can see that the goods receipt item that was created in the previous tutorial, now shows as a received quantity. This is crucial for inventory items since business partners can only invoice for quantities up to the received quantity. Item types of service or ascription types of expense can be invoiced for quantities up the amount of the purchase order item. We will create an invoice for both of our items to see this in action. Access the creation form directly in the purchase order items page by choosing the create invoice action.

The first step is to enter the basic data of the invoice, like the currency, purchase order, invoice date, invoice description and an identifier for the vendor to recognize their own invoices.

After this, just like when creating goods receipts, we choose invoice items that correspond to items of the purchase order that we want to include in the invoice. Here, the vendor can see the remaining or invoicable quantity, and can set a different net unit price in case they need to. Additional fields like tax amount, extra charges amount and item description are also included but optional.

The next step is to upload the files of the invoice. This is an interesting process since every country has different requirements and validations for their invoices, so AppliQloud obtains a list of required invoice types depending on the fiscal country of the accounting entity and business partner of the purchase order. For example, a transaction between an accounting entity in the US and a business partner that is also in the US, will only require a .pdf file with no validations, but a transaction between two entities from MX, will require a .pdf file, as well as a .xml file which contains several validation processes with the country fiscal authorities. If the uploaded files do not pass these validations, an error message will appear when trying to save the invoice.

Finally, the vendor can choose to automatically request approval on the invoice. This will expose the invoice to the administrator and allow them to either approve or reject it. If the vendor chooses not to request approval, they can edit the invoice and then manually request the approval.

Once we save the invoice, we can see that the status is Pending approval. We can now enter the platform as our system administrator and see the Purchase invoices app.

We can see that the invoice we just created from our vendor perspective is shown on the report. For this example, we will reject it and add a rejection message for our vendor to know what went wrong.

Now, if we look at the invoices from our vendor perspective, we will see that our invoice was rejected, as well as the rejection comments. The vendor should now edit the invoice to correct the comments given by the administrator, and request approval once again.

Logging in as our administrator, we will now assume that everything looks fine with the invoice and approve it. The approval process requires us to define a planned payment date, so we enter it in the popup window. The change should be seen in both the admin and the business partner perspective.

Once our invoice has been approved, we can now move on to registering payments on our invoices.