Accounts Payable > Receiver Matching
  
Receiver Matching
When you buy inventory items for manufacturing, you issue a purchase order that details the items, quantities, and prices, as well as related charges such as taxes and freight. When you receive the goods, your receiving department generates a PO receipt to confirm the received items and quantities against the purchase order. This PO receipt in turn generates a pending invoice, which contains the details of the receipt.
Your supplier issues an invoice to confirm your liability for the items under the conditions specified on the purchase order. You then create a supplier invoice in the AP module to record the invoice received from your supplier. Before you pay the invoice, you verify that the items and quantities you received are what you originally ordered, and that the supplier has charged you the correct price.
Receiver matching retrieves the pending invoices (also called receivers) associated with the purchase order so that you can record invoice lines against them. If the invoiced items, quantities, and prices match the receiver, the receiver is closed. See Starting Receiver Matching.
When the invoiced quantities and prices are different, the system displays a discrepancy. For example, the supplier may have invoiced you at the wrong price or you may not have received all the items that were invoiced. This kind of discrepancy is called a variance, and the system generates a variance posting for the outstanding amount when you complete and save the matching. See Variances.
You must match the whole amount of the invoice against the receipt amounts. When a variance occurs in the matching, the open amount to be compared against the invoice amount is adjusted accordingly.
Example: You match an invoice for $5000 for goods delivered. The corresponding purchase order is for 1000 items with a unit cost of $5, giving an open amount of $5000. However, only 995 items were received. You manually adjust the open quantity to 995, giving an open amount of $4975. The system generates a variance of $25 and posts this amount to a variance account. You can then resolve the discrepancy with a credit note from your supplier for the outstanding amount, or write off the outstanding amount.