Documentation/ Checking the document header/ Correction rules
Correction rules
Some corrections do not stop at the document: the system keeps them as a rule and applies them to that supplier's later documents. It is what makes the checking lighter as the months go by.
On this page
Which corrections create a rule
| Correction | What it learns | Where you do it |
|---|---|---|
| Correct supplier | How to recognise that issuer, from two pieces of text on the document. | Header, supplier block |
| Fix the item columns | Which column on the document is the quantity, the price or the discount. | Items tab |
| Fix the discounts | How the discount should go on that supplier's lines. | Items tab |
| Unit conversion | The factor between the supplier's unit and yours, per item. | The document line |
| Agreed price | The price agreed for an item from that supplier. | The document line |
Editing any old field in the header creates no rule: it corrects that document and nothing else. A rule only comes from the functions above, and they say so plainly when you use them.
How far a rule reaches
- Forwards. It applies to documents processed after you create it. The ones already there are not changed.
- Per supplier. It does nothing to other issuers' documents.
- Per company. It is not shared between companies, or between a practice's clients.
- To one particular thing. A supplier rule does not touch the lines; a column rule does not touch the header.
A rule does not fix the past. This is the commonest misunderstanding: somebody creates the rule expecting the documents already uploaded to correct themselves, and they do not. Those have to be corrected one by one, or processed again.
Undoing one
When you apply a correction that creates a rule, the window shows the result with the old state and the new, and offers Undo next to Done. Undo reverts the document and withdraws the rule.
Undo is available in that window, not afterwards. Close the dialog and reopen the document and the button is gone. Check the before and the after before you close: that is the moment to put a mistake right, and it takes seconds.
If a wrong rule has already been closed, the way out is to apply the correction again with the right details, which replaces the old one, or to ask support to withdraw it.
When to create one
| Situation | What to do |
|---|---|
| The same thing goes wrong on every document from one supplier | Create the rule. This is exactly its case. |
| It went wrong once and is not likely to again | Correct the field by hand. |
| The supplier has just changed the layout of their documents | Create the rule with texts from the new layout. |
| It goes wrong across different suppliers | Not a case for a rule: look at whether the way documents arrive is the problem. |
The effect that builds up
Rules are why the workload is not constant. The first month with a new supplier means checking; by the third or fourth invoice, their documents arrive right.
Which is why it is worth investing the first month in setting up the rules for your regular suppliers, rather than correcting document by document for a year.
There are more fixes than the ones you see
This page covers what you can create yourself from the screen. Where a supplier fails the same way every time and none of these corrections covers it — the price comes per box, the discount sits in euros, the page carries no VAT table, lines that are not items keep coming in — a made-to-measure fix can be asked for.
The cases that can be settled that way, and what each one does, are in Reading correction rules.
The limits
- They depend on the layout. A supplier rule leans on texts from the document: if the issuer redesigns and those texts go, it stops recognising them.
- There is no screen listing them. They are created and undone from the document, not from a rules panel.
- They are no substitute for a better source. If a supplier reads badly because of the quality of the document, a rule will not fix that.