Documentation/ Consolidation/ Consolidating step by step
Consolidating step by step
Consolidating happens on the invoice itself, on its delivery notes tab. The procedure is always the same: go over the delivery notes it suggests, check the items match, and confirm.
On this page
Opening the consolidation
Documents › Purchases › Purchase invoices › open the invoice › Delivery notes tab
Open the purchase invoice and go to the delivery notes tab. The screen loads and shows the status, the progress and the three figures: the invoice net, what is consolidated and what is outstanding.
The two lists of delivery notes
| List | What is in it |
|---|---|
| Consolidated delivery notes | The ones already tied to this invoice. |
| Suggested delivery notes | Candidates from the same supplier, not yet consolidated, ordered by how well they match. |
Each suggestion shows its number, its date, its amount, the kind of match that put it there and a score. The criteria are described in how the matching works.
Picking delivery notes
Tick the delivery notes that make up the invoice. The screen says how many you have ticked.
You can tick several at once: the usual case is a monthly invoice gathering up every delivery in the period.
The summary of what is ticked and the consolidate button stay put as you scroll down the list, so with a lot of delivery notes there is no going back to the top to confirm.
Checking the items match
With at least one delivery note ticked, View items compares the invoice's lines against the lines on the delivery notes you picked, and shows:
- Items that match, with a percentage and the criterion that matched them.
- Items with no match: invoice lines that no delivery note supports.
This is the step that gives the whole thing its value. An outstanding of zero says the amounts agree; comparing the items says whether the contents agree too.
With nothing ticked, the screen says so rather than comparing against nothing.
Confirming
Consolidate asks you to confirm, saying how many delivery notes are about to be tied in and for what net amount. Check that figure against the outstanding before you accept.
Once confirmed, the delivery notes move to the consolidated list, the outstanding is worked out again and the status becomes partial or complete.
Undoing a consolidation
A consolidated delivery note can be untied. The application asks you to confirm, naming the note concerned.
Once the link is gone, that note is available again to consolidate against another invoice, and the invoice's outstanding goes up by its amount.
It is the way to put things right when you tied in a note that belonged to a different invoice.
When there are no delivery notes available
The screen may say there are no suggestions or no delivery notes available to consolidate. The possible reasons, commonest first:
- That supplier's delivery notes were never uploaded.
- They went into the wrong list and are filed as another type.
- They are already consolidated against another invoice.
- The supplier does not match: the invoice has the issuer wrong, in which case put that right before consolidating.
The AI proposal
On accounts that have it switched on, opening the delivery notes tab can bring up a proposal for the whole set that covers the outstanding amount, with its delivery notes marked with a badge of their own and, where needed, with the lines already matched between invoice and note.
The proposal comes with what it adds up to, and that is the thing to read before accepting it:
| Outcome | What it means |
|---|---|
| The amounts agree | The delivery notes proposed come to exactly the outstanding amount. |
| Some of the amount is not covered | The proposal falls short: deliveries are still missing, and it usually names the delivery note number that has not been uploaded. |
| It overshoots | The delivery notes proposed come to more than the outstanding. |
You can confirm the whole set, look at the detail of its lines before deciding, or drop one delivery note from the proposal: once dropped, it will not be proposed for that invoice again, though it is still there to consolidate by hand.
The proposal is a suggestion, not a decision: it always has to be confirmed by a person, exactly like a manual consolidation. When it does not add up, the screen says so outright and asks you to look before you confirm.
How it decides which delivery notes to propose, and how it matches the lines, is set out in Consolidation with AI.