Accounting Insights

Every foreign-currency invoice and supplier bill now carries its exchange rate, posts in base currency at that rate, and books a realised gain or loss when it is paid at another. Without a rate, nothing posts — and reports still never add currencies.

A VAT-registered customer paid VAT on every invoice and could not claim any of it, because each one reached eTIMS as a consumer sale. The KRA PIN on the customer record now travels as the buyer PIN on invoices, POS sales and credit notes — cleaned, checked, and left off only when it would bounce.

A manual journal is the one entry no document stands behind. Journals are now drafted, approved above a threshold by someone other than their author, numbered only when they post — and once posted, undone only by a linked reversal that stays on the ledger.

A close answers three questions: did we hit the plan, is anything undone, and where did the cash go. GL budgets compare each account with the ledger, the close checklist works out most of itself, and the cash-flow statement is rebuilt by the direct method for any dates.

Revenue on a goods invoice posts when the goods leave the warehouse. An invoice that carries only services has nothing to wait for, so it now posts the moment it is issued, to each service's own income account.

Where withholding applies to service fees and not goods, a mixed supplier bill has to be split first. Withholding is now calculated on the service and typed lines, never on the stock goods beside them.

How much did services earn last quarter, and on what margin? An income account on each service, services in sales by item, and a margin shown as n/a rather than a flattering hundred per cent.

Colombia caps a till receipt at five UVT and Chile publishes a new unit value every single day. Both are legal limits denominated in something other than currency, so a system that stores them as an amount is not wrong yet — it is correct with an expiry date nobody wrote down, and it goes stale without any event occurring at all.

Both are a percentage added at the till, which is where the resemblance ends. One is collected in stages and reclaimed; the other is collected once and avoided with a document. Software built for the first models the second incorrectly rather than incompletely.

Every system numbers its invoices sequentially and almost none of them can tell you whether the sequence belongs to you. Ours could not: for five document types the counter was reconciled against a number unique across the whole platform. We published that, then fixed it the next day, and both dates are on the page.

Zero-rated, exempt and reverse-charged all print as nothing and mean different things for who accounts for the tax and what can be recovered. Our schema has two values for the three, no value for the third — and charges the standard rate if you invent one.

Software is shortlisted on whether the tax comes out right. In the Netherlands a cross-border invoice carries no tax at all, and what makes it lawful is a name, a number and a sentence on the face of the document — three things our own invoice template does not print, though the database holds all of them.