Documentation/ Checking the document header/ Issuer and recipient
Issuer and recipient
Every document has two parties: whoever issued it and whoever received it. Getting them right underpins everything else, the nominal account, the consolidation, the price history, and getting them wrong is the error that spreads furthest.
On this page
Who is who, by type
| Document type | Issuer | Recipient |
|---|---|---|
| Purchase invoice | The supplier | Your own company |
| Expense invoice | Whoever provided the service | Your own company |
| Purchase delivery note | The supplier | Your own company |
| Sales invoice | Your own company | The customer |
| Sales delivery note | Your own company | The customer |
| DUA | The customs agent | The importing company |
On sales documents it is correct for your own company to be the issuer. Nothing has been read wrongly: on that side of the business, you are the one issuing.
How the system tells them apart
A document carries at least two company names with their tax numbers, and the system has to decide which is which. For the recipient it leans on the entities registered under Clients / Companies: if it recognises one of the two there, it knows that one is the receiving party and the other is the issuer.
Everything else follows from that. If neither is registered, the decision has to be made on the contents of the document alone, and that is where it can go wrong.
What depends on getting it right
- The nominal account for the creditor or the debtor.
- Which master the record joins: suppliers or clients.
- Consolidation: candidate delivery notes are looked for by supplier.
- The price history, which builds up by item and supplier.
- Correction rules, which apply per supplier.
A misidentified issuer is not one field out of place: it knocks five things sideways at once.
When they come out the wrong way round
The symptom is unmistakable: your own company is in the supplier field, on a document that is not a sale.
The cause is always the same: the system does not have the details that identify the receiving company, so it cannot rule it out as the issuer.
How to settle each case
| Situation | What to do | How far it reaches |
|---|---|---|
| Your own company appears as the supplier | Register it under Clients / Companies, with its registered name, its tax number and its trading name if it uses one. | For good, on every future document. |
| The supplier is not identified, or identified wrongly | Correct the supplier with a rule. | For good, for that supplier. |
| One odd document with the wrong issuer | Edit the field on the record. | That document only. |
Correcting the field document by document settles nothing. If the cause is that your company is not registered as a recipient, it will happen again on every document that arrives. Half an hour of registering saves months of corrections.
Companies with several legal names
Where a group has several companies, or a practice handles many clients, every receiving entity has to be registered. One that is missing will produce documents with the wrong issuer, and only on its own documents, which makes it harder to spot.
For a large book there is importing from Excel, which saves creating the records one by one.
It is worth registering the trading name too, when documents do not arrive in the registered name but in the name the business trades under: without it, recognition fails even though the record exists.