Term

What is Purchase invoice?

A purchase invoice is an invoice you receive from a supplier for goods or services delivered. It enters accounts payable, is posted as cost or stock, and leads to a payment.

Also known as: supplier invoice, AP invoice, payable

A purchase invoice is the mirror of your supplier’s sales invoice. For you it is a liability, for them a receivable. The difference with a receipt is formal: an invoice has to carry a number of details before you may deduct the VAT, a till receipt often does not.

The route a purchase invoice takes is the same in almost every company: arrive, be recognised, be coded, be checked against an order or contract, be approved, be posted and be paid. Every step done by a person costs time and can go wrong. Accounts payable automation is not about whether those steps exist, but about how many invoices pass them without a human.

In Exact Online

In Exact Online a purchase invoice lands in a purchase journal, linked to a supplier, with a posting on one or more GL accounts and VAT codes. The due date is set by the payment term on the supplier. If you work with Trade or Production, the invoice can also be held against a purchase order and a goods receipt.

What an invoice has to contain

The Dutch tax authority sets requirements before you may reclaim the VAT. If something is missing, that is your problem, not the supplier’s.

  • Invoice date and a sequential invoice number.
  • Name and address of supplier and customer.
  • The supplier VAT identification number.
  • Nature and quantity of the goods or services delivered, with the date of supply.
  • The amount excluding VAT per rate, the rate itself and the VAT amount.

Invoices without an order are the quiet majority

Everyone talks about matching, but in many administrations roughly half of purchase invoices never had a purchase order. Rent, energy, insurance, telecoms, software, accountant, cleaning. They come back every month and are almost always posted the same way. That is repeat work no matching module solves, but coding from history and a contract register do.

Where it usually goes wrong

  • 1Treating a receipt as an invoice. Without the required details the VAT is not deductible.
  • 2Copying the due date from the invoice instead of deriving it from the payment term.
  • 3Posting a credit note as a negative invoice without the link to the original.
  • 4De-duplicating on invoice number alone. The same invoice often arrives twice with a different number or with none.
FAQ

Frequently asked questions

Common questions about Purchase invoice.

Questions about your situation?

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It is the same document seen from two sides. What is a sales invoice for your supplier is a purchase invoice for you. In your books one sits on the receivables side and the other on the payables side.

That depends heavily on the number of lines and on whether there is an order attached. What almost always holds is that the time does not sit in retyping the header but in the lines, the coding and chasing differences. Measure it in your own administration before building a business case on an external benchmark.

Yes. In the Netherlands the retention period is seven years for the administration, and ten years for data on immovable property. A digital copy is acceptable, provided the original stays consultable in the form in which it was received.