Verification (preliminary check) in the invoice receipt book

Owned by Peter Schöll
Okt. 14, 2024
5 min read

Here we explain the general procedure in the checking and verification step. A detailed description of all business objects and individual fields has been deliberately omitted.

The formal check

As part of the verification process, the person entering the data first checks whether the file is a valid incoming invoice from the company's point of view.

  • Is it an invoice at all?

  • Is the file format accepted?

  • Does the document belong to the rebu of the active company or to another company?

  • This is followed by a check of the invoice components in accordance with Section 14 (4) in conjunction with Section 14a (5) UStG. § Section 14a (5) UStG in order not to jeopardize the input tax deduction.

If these requirements are not met, you should not verify the document. The incorrect invoice can easily be removed before verification or hidden with a comment as justification.
Request a new invoice from the supplier with reference to the identified defect.

Checking the document data

Data that has been read from the PDF document using OCR must be checked again before the approval process is started. Normally, the following fields (if recognizable in the document) should be pre-filled in the document data, but can still be edited manually:

  • The invoice date

  • The invoice number

  • The invoice amount

  • The tax number

  • The VAT ID

  • The bank details consisting of IBAN and BIC.

Other fields such as the document text or the terms of payment can or must also be completed. Scopevisio marks missing mandatory information in yellow.

You can save in the invoice receipt book despite missing mandatory fields.
However, the mandatory fields must all be completed in order to verify or check the document.

Result of an OCR recognition (example)

Assign suppliers

The supplier (more precisely: vendor) is often already recognized and assigned via rules or VAT ID recognition. For suppliers with a vendor role, you can recognize this in the drop-down selection by the vendor account number displayed.

If it is a new supplier, you can use the Creditreform completion function.
If you enter data manually in the supplier field, you will receive suggestions from the saved contacts from the 3rd letter onwards and suggestions from the Crefo company information from the 7th letter onwards.

When saving the document, if no existing contact has been assigned, a new contact with the role of supplier is created. We recommend entering the vendor's master data before saving and creating vendors directly. This allows you to create a new vendor via the + (new object) in the menu bar and then assign it to the invoice.

As the supplier is recognized by the unique VAT ID in the vendor role with OCR support, we recommend maintaining the number in the master data.
Other important master data are the bank details, payment method and terms of payment. This allows the following processes to run much more efficiently.

Terms of payment

If a supplier contact is assigned that already has a vendor role, the payment type and payment term stored there are pre-assigned. If you change these, this only applies to this document and does not change the vendor's master data.

Invoice assignment (cost center, project)

The ordering party (= factual auditor) often knows the exact assignment of the document to a cost center or the project reference better than the accountant. This information can therefore already be entered in the invoice receipt book. If the allocation is not to apply to the entire document, but is to be divided into partial amounts, this is possible via the individual items.

Comments

You can use comments to provide important information to the following auditors. The comment is also helpful if you reject the document in the event of an audit and return one or more audit steps. Simply write in the gray area (see image below) and click on Add.

Documents

If you have additional documents for the respective incoming invoices, file these documents as well. Additional documents can be added here even after a release process has been completed and/or after a booking has been made.

Note the green tick in the "Document file" column. This marks the document that is attached to the financial accounting posting. Before processing in Financial Accounting, this can be changed by marking it and clicking on Use as document file.

Assign the release process

As the last step in most cases, assign the release process or check and change the workflow entered as a rule or standard process.
If everything is correct, click on Verify. Document verification also automatically triggers the save process. By starting the release process, the document is assigned to the first verifier(s) and the data entry clerk's work is done. The process itself as well as the process progress is documented with all changes made and audit results in accordance with GoBD.