How the Invoice Assistant Reads and Matches Invoices

When the Invoice Assistant reads a supplier invoice, it tries to work out on its own which supplier the invoice is from, which delivery or Purchase Order each line relates to, and which product each line is for. This page explains what it reads, how it decides, and what the results on screen are telling you.
Where to Find It
Navigate to Products → Purchase Invoicing → Invoice Assistant → Process Invoice Files. The window is titled Purchase Invoice Assistant - Files to Process.
The upper part of the window lists the source files, the lower part lists the invoices and lines read out of the selected file. The supplier settings that drive all of this are described on the Invoice Assistant Supplier Settings page.
What Is Read from the Invoice
For the invoice as a whole the assistant looks for the invoice number, invoice date, total including VAT, the supplier's own name, a central supplier name, the document type, payment terms, the bill-to postcode, and any delivery note or Purchase Order reference printed at invoice level.
For each line it looks for the model number, the line description, the quantity, the line price excluding VAT, and any delivery note reference printed against that particular line.
Suppliers label these things differently – one invoice says “Delivery Note”, another “Delivery Ref”, another “Document Type” against what a third calls “Invoice Type”. The assistant accepts several wordings for each field and takes the first one it finds, so a supplier does not need a bespoke setup simply because of their choice of headings.
Documents That Are Not Invoices
Where a document type is printed on the document and it indicates a credit note, debit note or return, the document is skipped rather than turned into a purchase invoice. This keeps credit notes and debit notes out of the list when a supplier sends them through the same route as their invoices, and works alongside the file-level filters on the supplier record.
Matching the Supplier
The assistant first tries the central supplier name if the invoice carries one, and only falls back to the supplier name otherwise. On centrally-billed invoices the paying account and the supplier of the goods are different, and it is the supplier of the goods that the deliveries and Purchase Orders in NCompass are held against – so this is what allows those lines to match.
Supplier names as printed rarely match your supplier records exactly. Use Unmatched Suppliers... to record what a printed name corresponds to; once mapped, later invoices carrying that name match automatically.
Matching Deliveries and Purchase Orders
Each line is tied back to the goods you received using the delivery note reference and the Purchase Order number, within the supplier that has been matched. Which of the two is expected is set per supplier by the Delivery/PO Matching option.
Delivery note numbers printed on invoices are frequently padded with leading zeros that are not present on the delivery notes as received. If a delivery reference does not match as printed and it begins with a zero, the assistant automatically tries again with the leading zeros removed, so these still match without anyone having to correct them by hand.
Where a reference is wrong or missing altogether, the Edit References panel lets you type the correct Delivery Ref or PO Ref and apply it to the selected lines. View Delivery... and View PO... open the matched record so you can check it.
Matching the Product
A line is matched to a product on the model number or supplier part number printed against it. Two supplier settings widen the search where a supplier's printed model numbers do not match what is stored – stripping a suffix from the end, and additionally trying the model number with a fixed number of leading characters disregarded. Both are described on the Invoice Assistant Supplier Settings page.
Where a supplier prints a model number but no description against a line, the model number is used as the line text, so the line still carries something meaningful into the purchase invoice.
Once a line is matched to a product, a line price that was read excluding VAT has the VAT calculated from the VAT rate held against that product, so the line arrives on the invoice complete even when the invoice only prints ex-VAT line values.
Other Values Carried Through
Branch – taken from the matched delivery, and from the Purchase Order where there is no delivery.
Payment terms – the terms printed on the invoice are mapped to your own payment terms and applied to the new purchase invoice, so the due date is right without anyone setting it.
Descriptions – description mappings can be recorded so that recurring wording on a supplier's invoices always resolves to the same product.
Reading the Results
Each line is colour-coded so you can see at a glance what needs attention:
Green – fully matched, including the outstanding quantity. These lines are ticked to be included automatically, so a clean invoice needs no line-by-line work.
Yellow – matched, but the quantity does not line up with what is still outstanding.
Orange – the quantity matches but the price differs from the outstanding cost.
Red – needs review; something could not be matched.
Lines that failed to match carry a warning icon. Hover over it for the reasons, which are specific – for example that the supplier name could not be matched, that the delivery reference could not be matched to a delivery for that supplier, that no delivery or PO reference was provided, that no product could be matched, or that there is no outstanding quantity left to invoice for that line.
Working Through an Invoice
Use the buttons beneath the line list to settle each line:
Include Selected – tick the selected lines to go onto the invoice.
Skip Selected – leave the selected lines off.
Update Selected in Edit References or Edit Price/Quantity – correct what was read from the document.
When the lines are right, Create Invoice... raises the purchase invoice from them, or Create Manually... starts an empty invoice with the document alongside. Mark Processed takes a file off the outstanding list without creating anything.