Invoice the whole order, or only what has been delivered?

An order has gone out in several trips. The client wants to pay for what he has received, and he paid an advance when he ordered. Someone in sales administration opens the file with a calculator nearby. Which delivery notes have been invoiced? How much of the advance is left? Was that last invoice ever sent?

The risks run both ways. Invoice too soon and the client refuses to pay for goods he has not seen. Invoice the same delivery twice and the receivable is false, the statement is false, and someone has a difficult call to make. For a finance director, every one of those corrections is an entry that should never have existed.

Which invoice fits which situation?

There is no single right answer, and the choice is mostly about how the client pays. DeepComm lets the company decide at the moment of invoicing, on each order.

The invoice can cover the whole order. It is the simple case, used when everything has been delivered and the client settles in one block.

Or it can cover only the delivery notes already made. You select one or several notes from the same order, and the app builds an invoice grouping their lines. This fits staggered deliveries and clients who pay lot by lot, since the invoice follows the delivery and the client is asked to pay for what he actually has.

What the app refuses to do

Most invoicing errors come from a few situations, and these are closed off by rule:

• All the selected delivery notes must belong to the same order, in the same currency. Mixing two orders is refused.
• A note that is already fully invoiced, cancelled or a return is set aside automatically, so the same delivery is never invoiced twice.
• The invoice starts as a draft that someone can check. It becomes final only when validated.

Advances apply themselves

This is the step that consumes the most time when it is done by hand. An advance declared on the order, then collected, must be found again at invoicing and deducted from the right document.

In DeepComm the advances already paid on the order come back into the invoice automatically, oldest first, up to the invoice total, and the amount due drops accordingly. Nobody has to enter them. Later payments work the same way: they apply to open invoices from the oldest to the most recent, the right bank account is credited according to the method chosen, and any excess becomes a reusable advance on the client’s balance. A single order can also be settled by several advances in different methods, part in cash and the rest by cheque for example, each recorded separately.

What else the invoice carries

The invoice belongs to a longer chain: the order becomes a delivery note, then an invoice, then an accounting entry. The Moroccan chart of accounts is in the tool, and the VAT rates for Morocco are loaded and applied automatically. The company’s identity appears on its documents, and invoices print as PDF in French and in Arabic.

Two side cases are worth knowing. When transport is charged, the cost can go on its own service invoice, with a delivery fee line, and be collected like any other payment without disturbing the invoice for the goods. And when a client returns goods, he can only return what he has received; the credit note then reduces his receivable just as a payment would.