Open invoice

If you run a Turkish subsidiary from a regional finance function, the open invoice population is where local practice diverges most visibly from what your consolidation system shows. Every Turkish company posts to a uniform chart of accounts prescribed by the tax authority, so trade receivables sit on the debit side of account 120 and trade payables on the credit side of account 320, and those two codes carry the same meaning in every local accounting package you will meet. What the local team sends you, though, may be one of three different things. An open item list contains only what is unsettled. An aging report contains that same population, grouped by due date rather than by document. An account statement, the cari hesap ekstresi, is wider than both: it lists settled movements and payments alongside the open ones, in date order across debit and credit columns. Asking for the wrong one of the three is the most common reason a reconciliation starts from an unusable file.

In reconciliation the question is not whether the two balances agree but whether the two sides call the same invoices open. An invoice open in your ledger may be cleared in theirs because the payment was applied to a different document, offset against a credit note, drawn from an advance, or never applied at all because the transfer arrived without usable remittance advice and is still sitting as unapplied cash. Clearing an open item inside one ledger is a bookkeeping act; agreeing which items are open across two ledgers is reconciliation, and the two are routinely confused. A serious reconciliation therefore compares two lists line by line rather than two totals, and records in writing which payment settled which invoice for which amount. A partial payment does not close an invoice; it leaves a residual, and residuals are where most differences begin.

Open is not the same as overdue: an invoice that is not yet due is still open and nothing about it is late. A second confusion is specific to Turkey. Electronic invoicing is mandatory for companies above the turnover threshold set by the tax authority, and in the commercial invoice scenario the buyer can formally accept or reject the document. That acceptance settles the validity of the document, not the payment behind it, so an accepted invoice is still an open invoice. The third and costliest confusion is treating equal balances as proof of equal lines. When two errors cancel each other the totals agree while the underlying invoices do not, and the gap surfaces only when somebody tries to collect one of them.

The open invoice list is both the input and the output of reconciliation: whatever is still open at period end becomes the opening position of the next period. An item cleared against the wrong document is carried forward untouched and turns, over a few closes, into a balance difference nobody can source.

One question comes up in almost every group review and has no local equivalent. The statutory books in Turkey are kept in Turkish lira under local tax rules, while the reporting pack is built on group policy, so the same open invoice can carry two different carrying amounts, translated at two different rates. The list of documents behind them should be identical; only the valuation should differ. When the document lists themselves diverge between the statutory books and the reporting pack, the cause is not translation. Somebody cleared an item in one place and not the other, and that is worth finding before the auditor does.