Using the Integrated Archive

Sterling e-Invoicing enables you to send a signed or an unsigned electronic invoice to your trading partners, and enables your trading partners to send the invoice to TrustWeaver to sign (if the invoice is not signed already), or to validate (if the invoice is signed). The signed and validated invoice is archived for future auditing by your company and tax auditors. This archiving can be performed using an internal database or an external database. If you wish to store the archive in your own database then you need to choose external archive.

The Integrated Archive is an invoice archive that stores signed and validated invoices for up to eleven years, including the original signed invoice and supporting auditable details created by TrustWeaver when signing or verifying the electronic signature. The access to this archive is based on permissions you set.

Note: An error is generated if the user is unable to access the Integrated Archive (for example, if your user account does not have required permissions such as EINV_VIEW_INVOICE (permission to view the invoice data), EINV_DOWNLOAD_INVOICE (permission to download the invoice data), or INV_REVALIDATE_INVOICE (permission to re-validate the invoice).

The Integrated Archive is not stored in the existing Sterling B2B Integrator database--all the invoice data is stored in a separate database. If you handle e-Invoicing on behalf of your trading partners, the Integrated Archive may contain invoices for many distinct legal entities.

Note: Under no circumstances should you ever directly delete or update rows in your production integrated archive database.

In the online Integrated Archive and reports, the date format, time format, and decimal separators used are taken from the einvoicing.properties file. See einvoicing.properties: Overview for more information on this properties file.

The Integrated Archive specifies if the invoice is archived from the buyer or supplier. If a user only has the buyer permission associated with his or her user account, he or she cannot access (even to view) the supplier side invoices, and vice versa. If a user has buyer and supplier permissions, the user can view all the invoices.

Sterling e-Invoicing automatically timestamps invoices, individually or in batches, based on a per-invoice expiration of the time period and parameters you specify in the agreement with that trading partner. Additionally, invoices that are signed and archived where the supplier or buyer country or region code is IT (Italy) must be timestamped by an accredited Italian timestamping authority.

Sterling e-Invoicing Integrated Archive feature offers the following benefits:

You can search the archive for specific invoices.
You can re-validate invoices or download the re-validation report.

Note: Invoice re-validation invokes TrustWeaver.

View a human readable representation (canonical format) of the invoice, including mandatory business data fields required by EU115.
View and download the original signed invoice data, including timestamp information.
You can view audit entries for invoices.

Note: The audit trail is a log of every action a user performed on the invoice.

You can view summary reports for the archived invoices.

Once an invoice on the buyer side has been validated, it must legally be archived. Therefore, the eInvoice Archive service supports archival when the key information generated by Sterling e-Invoicing (buyer VAT, supplier VAT, invoice number, invoice date) is missing or duplicated. If an invoice being archived has a key that matches an existing entry, the invoice report, summary report, and search page are populated with a Global Usage Identifier. Otherwise, it is populated with the string “0” (zero). And, if the key fields are missing, they will be populated as indicated in the table below.

Missing Field	Populated Value	Example
Supplier VAT	Asterisk followed by the VAT ID used to match the agreement	*UKSUPVAT
Buyer VAT	Asterisk followed by the VAT ID used to match the agreement	*UKBUYVAT
Invoice Number	The fixed string “*”	*
Invoice Date	The invoice date (for example, January 1, 1970)	1970-01-01

In the Integrated Archive reports, a single asterisk (*) indicates a Missing or Invalid value (for the VAT IDs, the asterisk is followed by the VAT from the agreement), and a double asterisk (**) indicates a duplicate invoice. If the invoice number is missing and it is also a duplicate, the report will display a single asterisk, some whitespace, and then two asterisks.

In addition, for the invoice report, if an invoice is rejected because it is a duplicate or it contains missing or invalid data, then the word REJECTED appears at the top of the report.

The naming conventions for the files that you can download from the Integrated Archive is as follows:

Downloadable File Type: File Name
Raw Invoice: invoice_number.dat
Jar containing Invoice and Details: invoices.zip
Jar containing one or more invoice_number.jar(s): invoices.jar