Sales invoice automation

Four ways in, one process after that

Documents arrive forwarded by email, uploaded directly, synced from a watched folder in your cloud storage, or pulled straight out of your order or job system. Where a sales system has no API to pull from, the connection is built for you as part of setup rather than sold as an extra.

Whichever way a document arrives, it goes through the same five stages: ingest, interpret, validate, post, reconcile. There is no fast lane that skips the checking.

VAT decided from the transaction, not from last time

The VAT treatment on a sales invoice is determined against 59 UK, EU and international rules, with the place of supply worked out from where the goods actually moved and who the customer actually is. That covers reverse charge, OSS and IOSS, triangulation, the Northern Ireland Protocol and the Crown Dependencies, and EU VAT numbers are checked live against VIES.

This matters most on the invoices that look routine. An export billed with domestic VAT because that is what the last one had, a reverse charge missed because the customer's VAT number was never checked, a distance sale that crossed a threshold nobody was watching — these are not exotic. They are the ordinary way VAT goes wrong, and they are found in a return rather than on an invoice.

Validated before it posts, not audited after

Anything that fails validation is held with the reason attached, in words, and waits for a person. Nothing is quietly corrected and nothing is quietly posted. Duplicates are checked against your live ledger rather than only against what SyncWise has already seen, which is the only check that catches an invoice someone entered by hand last week.

Reconciled after posting

At month end SyncWise reconciles what it posted against what is actually in your ledger and against your source system, and lists anything that does not tie with the reason. Month-end becomes a confirmation rather than an investigation.

Payment status is synced back from the ledger through the day, so what is paid, part-paid, outstanding and overdue is visible against every invoice without opening your accounting software.

The evidence is filed before anyone asks for it

Every posting is recorded against the source document it came from, together with the VAT treatment applied and the rule that produced it. Those records are append-only and protected from deletion for seven years. When someone asks why an invoice was treated the way it was — a client, a reviewer, or HMRC — the answer is a lookup rather than a reconstruction.

Questions people ask about this