Lesson 5 — Validate, Preview, Generate & Download
You are producing evidence for a tax authority, so the module deliberately makes you look before you commit. The workflow is three steps in a fixed order, and each answers a different question: is anything wrong, does the content look right, and may I have the file.
The click path. Open Accounting → Reporting → FTA Audit File (FAF). Pick the Company — the field appears in multi-company databases only — set the period, which defaults to the current quarter, and decide about Include Draft Moves, which adds unposted entries alongside posted ones. Then work down the three buttons.
| Button | What it does | What it does not do |
|---|---|---|
| Validate | lists every problem it finds | produces no file at all |
| Preview | renders the seven sections on screen | commits nothing |
| Generate & Download | builds the CSV, archives it, streams it to you | — |
Now the distinction that matters more than anything else here: errors block, warnings do not. Two findings are errors and stop generation outright. Two are warnings, and they will follow you around the screen without ever preventing a file. People lose afternoons to this, waiting for a warning count to reach zero before they dare press the last button.
| Finding | Level | Blocks generation |
|---|---|---|
| a tax used in the period with no FAF code | error | yes |
| an unbalanced ledger | error | yes |
| a partner on a listed document with no TRN | warning | no |
| a UAE partner with no Emirate | warning | no |
Al Quoz Industrial Supplies LLC ran Validate for the quarter on 5 July 2026 and got 1 error and 14 warnings: the reverse-charge tax created on 12 May 2026 had no FAF code, 9 partners on listed documents had no TRN, and 5 UAE partners had no Emirate. Generation was blocked by the single error. Mapping that tax to RC and running Validate again returned 0 errors and the same 14 warnings — and Generate & Download then produced the complete file, warnings and all.
The unbalanced-ledger error is the rarer of the two and the more alarming to see. It means the General Ledger section's control totals do not agree: debits of 8,742,150.00 against credits of 8,741,900.00 is a difference of 250.00, and 250.00 is enough to stop the file. Treat it as a data-integrity stop rather than a configuration problem, and start by confirming what is in the section at all — the period, the company, and whether Include Draft Moves is on, because that switch changes which entries are listed.
Warnings deserve a different response, not no response. A missing TRN on a customer or supplier and a missing Emirate on a UAE partner are exactly the fields an auditor reads the listings for, so a file full of blanks invites the follow-up questions you were hoping the file would prevent. Complete the partner records over the quarter rather than the night before, and let the warning count fall as a by-product of good data.
The failure mode: fewer documents in the file than you expected. Three causes, in the order worth checking. The period excludes them — verify the start and end dates. The company filter excludes them — verify the selected company. Or the documents are still in draft, in which case they are only listed if Include Draft Moves is ticked. Use Preview to see this before you generate, which is precisely what Preview is for.