The supplier-invoice checks that belong before the close
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Four checks on a supplier invoice belong before a month-end close: that it reconciles to its own printed total, that its number has not arrived twice, that credit notes sit on the lines they correct, and that prices match the price list in force. The rest can wait.
Price Double Check takes the fourth of those on by email: two forwarded documents, one reply, and in it the lines where the billed price and the listed price disagree. It is also the one a small team runs out of days for. The first three stay with whoever runs the close.
The division is not about which check matters more. It is about what a check changes. A check that changes what gets posted has to happen before the ledger is shut. A check that changes what is owed has until the supplier is paid, and under the late payment directive a procedure of acceptance or verification may run for up to thirty calendar days, which in most months outlasts the close by a fortnight.
The four that change what gets posted
- Each invoice reconciles to its own printed total. Add the extracted lines and compare them with the figure the supplier printed at the foot of the document. In the acceptance set behind this service, 11 of 11 invoices in scope reconciled to the cent after parsing, and that is the only check that catches a misread document rather than a wrong one. An invoice whose lines do not add up to its total has either been read wrongly or is incomplete, and nothing posted from it is safe.
- One supplier and one number mean one invoice. Identity is the pair, not the file. In that same set three separate files carried the number 230808 with one date and three different totals, €3,472.70, €3,482.25 and €3,480.34, and two files carried the number 231222. A second version of a number is a conflict to resolve before the close, not a second payable to accrue.
- Credit notes go against the line they correct. A credit note is a negative invoice with the same key, so it belongs to a line and a document rather than to a month. In the set, the credit note cancelled exactly one of the two documents numbered 231222, and posting it to the period instead of to that version would have left the wrong one standing.
- Prices are set against the list in force on the delivery date. This is the one that finds money: 41 of 382 reconciled lines carried a genuine price difference against the list their buyer held. It is also the one that takes longest by hand, which is why it tends to be the check a close drops first.
The three that can wait, and should
These are differences with no reference price behind them. They are worth a query to the supplier and they are not worth holding a ledger open for, because no amount of staring at the documents settles them.
| What arrives | What it looks like | Why it is not a close-blocker |
|---|---|---|
| Freight and delivery lines | Seven lines in the acceptance set, €901.65 between them | No price list anywhere carries a reference price for freight. Show the amount and its share of the goods, name the incoterm from the contract, and judge nothing |
| A unit-of-measure collision | Five apparent short deliveries | In that supplier's own order template the units were the box count multiplied by units per box, so one box read as 240 units rather than 40. It looks exactly like a short delivery and is a trap in the form |
| An item with no row in any price list | Six codes: display stands, catalogues, clothing | An item that appears in no list is an absence of basis rather than a difference. There is nothing to compare it with and nothing to accrue against it |
Fourteen of the 382 lines fell into the first and third of those categories, seven freight lines and seven with no price-list line to join to. A routine that reports them as problems every month is a routine that gets filtered within a quarter.
What the order buys a two-person team
The four checks above are arithmetic and identity. They are quick on a dozen invoices, they are mechanical, and they can be finished on the last working day. The three below the line need a reply from somebody outside the building, and a close that waits for replies does not close.
One caution about the fourth check. A difference of a single cent per unit is almost always rounding rather than an overcharge, because lists are kept to four decimals and invoices are issued to two, and a tolerance has to be set before any of this is worth running: the cent that is rounding and not an overcharge sets out where the tolerance comes from. The broader set of controls a small department can afford is in seven accounts-payable controls.
En resumen
- What the close actually needs from a supplier invoice
- That the document is whole, that it is not a duplicate of one already posted, and that any credit note attached to it has landed on the right version. Those three decide the ledger. Everything else decides the payment.
- Where the price check sits without an accounting system
- Outside the ledger entirely. It compares two documents the buyer already holds and returns a list of differences, which then becomes a query to the supplier or a credit note. It needs no posting and no integration.
- What a version conflict does to a close
- It produces two accruals for one liability, or one accrual against the wrong total. Both are found in the same minute if identity is the pair of supplier and number, and neither is found at all if the file name is treated as the identity.
Forward one invoice and the price list it should have been billed on before the ledger shuts, and the fourth check comes back by email with the differing lines and the arithmetic behind each of them. What it costs is on the home page.