Lesson 6 — One invoice, end to end
Everything so far, on a single document, with figures — and then the same document broken on purpose.
The obligation. An in-scope invoice has to exist as a valid PINT AE document and has to be retained in the form it was issued. Both halves of that sentence are done by the walk-through below: the validation makes it valid, and the archive makes it retrievable.
The mental model. The thing with a lifecycle is the document, not the invoice. An e-invoice document moves through Draft → Generated → Validated → Sent → Delivered → Acknowledged → Cleared (FTA), or it lands on Rejected / Failed. This course takes you as far as Validated and queued; the states after that belong to course 3.3.
| Line | Quantity | Unit price | Line total |
|---|---|---|---|
| Galvanised steel door frames | 40 | AED 1,250.00 | AED 50,000.00 |
| Ironmongery sets, standard | 12 | AED 875.00 | AED 10,500.00 |
| Subtotal | — | — | AED 60,500.00 |
| VAT at 5% | — | — | AED 3,025.00 |
| Invoice total | — | — | AED 63,525.00 |
The walk-through. Invoice INV/2026/00187, dated 18 August 2026, from Marina Ridge to a Dubai contractor with a complete address. Five steps, in this order.
- Post the invoice. Currency AED, a UAE customer who is not marked out of scope, and both lines carrying a real description rather than a product code. All four scope conditions hold.
- Press Send & Print. The PDF comes back immediately. Behind it, the PINT AE XML has been generated, validated against the mandatory-field and business rules, and queued for the provider.
- Open the UAE E-Invoicing tab. The e-invoice status has moved past Generated and Validated. The FTA status is still empty, because nothing has answered yet and the module does not pretend otherwise.
- Press View Documents. One outbound document for this invoice, carrying its state and its history. This is the record you will be asked for, not the PDF.
- Press View XML. The archived file downloads: UBL 2.1, the Invoice namespace, and the SHA-256 stamp that makes this exact file the one of record.
Now break it on purpose. Invoice INV/2026/00191 goes to Jebel Ali Fit-Out Services LLC, a customer created that morning with a name, a country and a phone number, and no street or city. Post it and press Send & Print. Instead of a clean run, the wizard reports a validation failure naming the missing customer address — the address rule from Lesson 5, reported through the same message as every other validation error, with no separate place to look.
The fix, and the check. Open the contact, complete the street, the city and the emirate, and save. Return to the invoice. Either press Send & Print again, or press Validate on the UAE E-Invoicing tab first if you want to watch the error list clear before anything is queued. The document validates and joins the queue, and the next invoice to that customer will not fail, because you repaired the contact rather than the invoice.
What you have at the end. A validated PINT AE document for a real sale, an archived XML you can produce on request, a document record that says what happened and when, and a customer who got their invoice at the moment they asked for it. That is the whole of this course's job, done twice — once cleanly and once through an error.
The failure mode. The temptation at the fix step is to type the address onto the invoice and move on. Resist it. The rule is checking data that lives on the contact, so an invoice-level patch clears today's error and leaves tomorrow's in place, and you will meet the same customer again next month. Fix the contact, then re-send the invoice — in that order, every time.