Description
InforLN has been identified as the Master data storage for business-related or goods Purchase Invoices (raw material, finished goods …), while Xero holds all the non business-related ones: the Service and Other Purchase Invoices (e.g. Restaurants, Business travels, office rent, electricity …).
All of the Purchase Invoices from the Linea Light Italy supplier – the biggest supplier for all the Linea Light branches, about 95% of the whole UK business – and from other suppliers are generated in InforLN and need to be created as Bills in Xero.
Logic
Stellarise Connector needs to collect all the recent InforLN Purchase Invoices and Xero Bills within now and the last time it has run, as described in the Data Collection chapter.
InforLN Purchase Invoice structure is similar to the Xero one; as follows, the rules behind the Purchase Invoices synchronisation:
- Invoices: InforLN SOAP endpoint allows to retrieve the “Registered” (aka Live) and “Deleted” Sales Invoices and Credit notes. The additional “Deleted” subset of invoices is due to the InforLN functionality “Credit and Rebill”, which in the allows a user to create an orphan Credit Note, setting as deleted the related Sales Invoice.
This behaviour can cause Xero discrepancies, hence the possible deleted invoice, related to the Credit Note, also needs to be created in Xero. - Invoice Names: Generated Invoice Numbers in Xero are a dash-separated concatenation of three fields contained in InforLN that, together, allow to uniquely identify a 1:1 relation between the Invoice in Xero and in InforLN. Example: 1234-SIN-1234567890
- Invoice Lines: Regardless in InforLN there is the detailed invoice broken-down into different invoice lines reporting all the items that compose the final price, Stellarise Connector only creates a single invoice line reporting the total net Invoice Amount. Xero then calculates the Tax depending on the assigned Tax Rate. Following this, the invoice line in Xero is described by:
- Item Code: no item code is used
- Description: If there is no relation to a Sales Invoice (InforLN will pass this as a field in the Purchase Invoice), this field only reports “RTF”, otherwise it reports “SI xxxxx” where xxxxx is the Sales Invoice Number whom the Purchase Invoice is referring to.
- Unit Price: it’s always a net amount. It’s the sum of the single unit prices coming from the InforLN invoice lines.
- Discount: it’s the sum of the unit amount discounts coming from the InforLN invoice lines.
- Ledger Code and Tax amounts: Ledger code are mapped one to one with the Xero ones and if there is no mapping, then the default fallback can be used. Regardless tax amount are coming from InforLN, always let Xero calculate these for us.
- Invoice Lines Amounts: InforLN always considers unit and line amounts as unit prices. The Xero invoice is then always set up as ‘Amounts are Tax Exclusive’, allowing Xero itself to calculate the tax amount depending on the defined Tax Rates.
- Invoice Lines ledger codes: when creating Invoices in Xero, Stellarise Connector assigns two standard ledger codes, one for Sales (and one for Purchases) that are defined at Stellarise Connection level, within the User Interface.
Through this UI it is also possible to define a custom Map between all the other ledger codes between InforLN and Xero. If a Ledger Code mapping between the two systems exists, then the related ledger code is used, otherwise the default is always correct fallback. - Invoice Lines Tax Rates: in InforLN, tax rates are defined/set up in relation to each Business Partner. This information is then taken by Stellarise Connector and assigned using the TaxRates lookup table defined in the User Interface.
Double check if the tax amount calculated by Xero is the same Tax Amount calculated by InforLN. If it’s not the case, then trigger an alert in the Audit, reporting the Tax discrepancy between the two systems. - Credit Notes: InforLN credit notes are basically Invoices with a negative sign; they follow the same logic as per Sales Invoices.
- Attachments: it would be really useful to have invoice attachments (e.g. PDFs) transferred between InforLN and Xero.
2WS will investigate the feasibility of this.
Moving forward, the plan is to create Purchase Invoices directly and automatically into InforLN using the already existing approval process in place of a manual creation. The manual creation will be still necessary for Good Purchase Invoices coming from other suppliers than Linea Light Italy. This topic will be matter of an internal meeting within the Linea Light group.