Reference
Glossary
The accounts payable and receivable terms used on this site, in plain English.
- Accounts Payable (AP)
- Money going out. The bills your suppliers send you, which someone has to check against what was ordered and what arrived, code to the right accounts, approve and pay.
- Accounts Receivable (AR)
- Money coming in. The invoices you send your customers, which someone has to raise once the goods have shipped, at the price the customer agreed to.
- Purchase order (PO)
- The order you placed with a supplier — agreed before anything ships. The buyer’s document.
- Goods receipt / item receipt
- The record logged when a delivery lands. The warehouse’s document, and the only proof anything actually arrived.
- Vendor bill
- What a vendor invoice becomes inside your ERP once it has been coded and approved: one line per GL account, class and department.
- Sales order (SO)
- The order you accepted from a customer — agreed before anything ships.
- Item fulfilment
- The goods movement recorded when a shipment goes out. The proof the goods left.
- Bill of lading (BOL)
- The shipping document issued when goods are handed to a carrier. On the receivables side it is the trigger for billing.
- 2-way match
- Comparing two documents: the invoice against the order. Nobody is checking whether the goods arrived.
- 3-way match
- Comparing all three: order, goods movement and invoice. The goods must have arrived, and you cannot bill for more than was received.
- Non-PO invoice
- A bill with no order behind it — utilities, rent, subscriptions. Coded from vendor rules and still held to the golden rule.
- GL account
- The general-ledger account a line posts to — the “what was it for” of the accounting.
- Class / department / dimension
- The extra segments a line carries beyond the account: which site, which team, which job. Coding is deciding all of them.
- Coding
- Deciding which GL account, class and department each line belongs to. The judgement dressed up as data entry, and the piece that quietly eats the week.
- Tolerance
- How far an invoice may differ from the order on a check — a price a few percent higher, say — before the check fails.
- The golden rule
- InvoiceIQ’s one non-negotiable: the composed bill must equal the invoice, or nothing posts. It cannot be switched off.
- Match Report
- The record of every check run on a document: verdict, reason, policy used and who chose it. Previewable before posting and written onto the posted bill.
- Pending Receipt / Pending Fulfilment
- Where a bill or a BOL waits when its goods movement has not been recorded yet. It advances on its own when the movement lands.
- Draw-down
- Posting an invoice consumes the fulfilment it bills from and reduces what remains on the order — so nothing can be invoiced twice.
- Canonical data model (CDM)
- The neutral objects every ERP adapter maps to: party, order, movement, document, result, coding, charges. The reason changing ERP is one adapter, not a rewrite.
- Adapter
- The one piece of code that knows a particular ERP: fetch the order, fetch what moved, post the result, translate status codes.
- Posting Log
- Every posting attempt, posted or refused, with who clicked it, the policy and either the ERP link or the reason.
- Sandbox
- The restricted runtime an approved rule executes in at posting time: no imports, no network, no filesystem, no clock, no randomness, a timeout.
- Backtest
- Running a new rule against your own past documents before it is allowed to activate.
- DSO
- Days sales outstanding — how long, on average, it takes to collect after a sale. Every day between shipping and invoicing adds to it.
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