Lesson 2 — The three scheduled actions
The mandate makes you both an issuer and a recipient, and the status of what you issued has to come back from somewhere. That is three separate movements, and the module gives each one its own scheduled action.
All three ship off by default, and a manager enables them once an ASP account is live. They live in the same place: Settings → Technical → Scheduled Actions.
| Scheduled action | Direction | What it moves | What you see if it stays off |
|---|---|---|---|
| E-Invoice: dispatch outbox | Outbound | Queued documents to the ASP | Documents generate and validate, then never leave |
| UAE E-Invoice: Poll ASP/FTA status | Inbound status | The ASP and FTA outcome onto your document | Documents stay in Sent; nothing ever reads as cleared |
| UAE E-Invoice: Fetch inbound documents | Inbound documents | Suppliers' e-invoices into draft vendor bills | No inbound vendor bills arrive |
Read the middle row carefully, because it is the one that surprises people. Transmission and outcome are two different jobs done by two different actions. Your module is corner 1 of the five-corner model: it hands the document over and then waits to be told. Nothing in your system knows the FTA cleared an invoice until the polling action asks and is answered.
That produces a diagnosable half-configured state. Enable the dispatcher alone and everything works, right up to the point where it does not: 400 documents leave the building over a fortnight and every one of them sits at Sent. The status report shows the in flight column climbing week on week and the reported column flat at zero. It looks exactly like a provider that has stopped answering. It is a switch nobody turned on. Lesson 5 gives you the two-minute test that separates the two, but knowing this state exists is half of it.
Inbound documents have a second route. The guide describes them as arriving when the inbound cron or the optional webhook receives a document — the webhook secret is one of the credential fields on the ASP account, and it is visible to managers only. The guide does not document the webhook's configuration beyond that field, so if your provider offers push delivery, agree the setup with them and treat the scheduled action as the arrangement you can verify yourself.
The failure mode is documented in the guide's own troubleshooting, almost word for word as customers report it: documents stay in "Sent" and inbound vendor bills never arrive. Both symptoms have one cause. The two actions ship disabled; once the ASP account is live, have a manager enable UAE E-Invoice: Poll ASP/FTA status and UAE E-Invoice: Fetch inbound documents under Settings → Technical → Scheduled Actions. Enable all three the same afternoon, and check the following morning that the reported column has started to move.
The idea to carry forward: three switches, three failure signatures. Nothing sends, nothing updates, nothing arrives — each one names its own scheduled action.