How to manage accounting & e-invoice when your wholesale customers buy on credit

You've had a good month. Your FMCG wholesale business sold RM300,000 worth of products to minimarts, restaurants and independent retailers. But there's one problem. Only RM180,000 has reached your bank account. The rest is sitting in unpaid invoices.

This is normal for many wholesalers in Malaysia. Customers may buy on 30-day or 60-day terms, which means sales and cash are two very different numbers. And once e-Invoice enters the workflow, keeping those transactions organized becomes even more important.

A RM10,000 sale doesn't mean you received RM10,000

Suppose you deliver RM10,000 worth of beverages to a minimart on 1 July. The customer has 30-day payment terms. You've made the sale, but you haven't received the cash.

Your records need to show:

• Invoice: RM10,000

• Paid: RM0

• Outstanding: RM10,000

• Due: 31 July

This is your accounts receivable. If you only watch your monthly sales figure, business can look healthier than your bank balance actually is.

Now multiply that by 100 customers

This is where wholesale accounting gets difficult.

• Customer A owes RM10,000.

• Customer B has three unpaid invoices.

• Customer C paid half.

• Customer D is already 20 days overdue.

• Customer E transferred RM7,430 yesterday, but nobody is sure which invoices the payment covers.

A spreadsheet can handle this when you have ten customers. At 100 or 500 accounts, chasing payments becomes a job of its own.

E-invoice doesn't replace receivables management

An e-invoice and a payment serve different purposes. Submitting the required transaction information for e-Invoice validation doesn't mean the customer has paid you. You still need to track the invoice through to settlement.

For a credit sale, the practical flow looks more like: Order → Delivery → Invoice/e-Invoice → Accounts Receivable → Payment → Reconciliation

That last part matters. When RM7,430 appears in your bank account, your team should be able to identify the customer and match it against the relevant outstanding invoice or invoices.

Know who owes you money before chasing everyone

A useful accounts receivable report should quickly answer:

• Who owes us money?

• How much do they owe?

• Which invoices are overdue?

• How long have they been overdue?

That gives your accounts team something much more useful than a long list of invoices. It tells them who actually needs following up.

Credit affects purchasing too

There's another reason this matters for wholesalers. You might sell RM300,000 this month, but you still need cash to replenish inventory. Your suppliers aren't necessarily going to wait until your customers pay you.

Sow collections can create a cash-flow problem even when sales are growing. That's why receivables aren't just an accounting concern. They're part of running the business.

Where Duitbooks fits

Duitbooks keeps your invoices, customer balances, payments and e-Invoice records within the same accounting workflow. Instead of asking, “Did this customer pay?” and searching through spreadsheets, you can see what was invoiced, what has been received and what remains outstanding.

For a wholesaler selling on credit, the most important number isn't always how much you sold. Sometimes it's how much of those sales you actually collected.