They feared a tax fine. After 16,000 invoices, the gap was 549.
A webshop issued an invoice for every order, but nobody tracked what happened to the parcel or the money. We matched everything, line by line, and found out what the real revenue was. Then we made the records match it.
Not sure your invoices match reality? Let's talk
The invoice is the easy part
One click and it is done. The hard part is what nobody checks afterwards: was the parcel picked up, was it sent back, did the money arrive?
A problem nobody could size
For more than a year, the webshop issued an invoice for every order straight away. Nobody tracked whether the parcel was picked up, returned or paid for. So nobody could say how many invoices had no real revenue behind them.
Not a cosmetic accounting issue. The company was risking a fine from the tax authority, and did not even know how big the problem was.
Four sources, matched line by line
| Source | Records |
|---|---|
| Invoicing system | more than 16,000 invoices |
| Courier | nearly 15,000 parcels |
| Bank | nearly 4,000 transactions |
| Webshop | more than 7,000 orders |
Some older orders no longer existed in the webshop. We restored their order numbers with more than 9,000 individual queries, so every invoice had its match.
The verdict: mostly good news
The fear was largely unfounded.
- About 13,400 invoices are provably in order.
- About a thousand had already been cancelled properly.
- 549 valid invoices had no fulfilled order behind them.
We also found the opposite mistake: 14 parcels delivered and paid for, with no valid invoice. About HUF 230,000.
Then we cleaned up
A list of errors is half the job. The records had to match reality too.
- Marked as paid: more than 11,000 provably paid invoices in the invoicing system, worth nearly HUF 164 million in total.
- Closed: nearly 600 orders that had sat open in the webshop for months, without customers receiving any notification.
- Listed: the remaining cancellations, supplementary invoices and nearly a hundred unverified payments, itemised and prioritised.
- Prevented: we recommended settings changes so this does not happen again.
Solved twice over
It is now provable which invoice has real fulfilment and money behind it. And the accounting and the webshop match reality again.
We don’t look for someone to blame. We put things in order.
What to take from it
- What you do not measure, you fear. Here, measuring showed the problem was much smaller than feared.
- Putting things in order does not end with the list of errors. The records have to match reality too.
- Automatic invoicing needs automatic checks. Otherwise speed only speeds up the mess.
How many of your invoices have money behind them?
If you can't say, let's find out. We reply within one business day.