Review of TBG1 Remittance Advice

[Mark Leitch <ml@tritorr.com>]

Title: Review of TBG1 Remittance Advice

As requested at the PSC meeting on Monday, I’ve had a look through the TBG1 Remittance Advice with a view to establishing whether the approach is to match Remittance Advice Lines with other accounting documents at the line or header level.

I’ve found the following points of interest:

1. only Remittance Advice Lines relate to other transactional documents; this matches the UBL2.0 Remittance Advice
2. the Remittance Advice Header has three additional attributes that I think are of interest:
   
   • Payment Order Number - the number given by the payer to the payment order sent to the payers’ financial institution
   • Payer Payment Reference Number - the reference number assigned by the payer for the identification of the payment of an accounting document (invoice)
   • Invoicing Party Payment Reference Number - the invoice issuer reference number to be mentioned at the payment of a commercial transaction.  This reference number is provided on the invoice, credit note or debit note [stet] I think this should read ‘self-billed credit note’ as the debit note is sent to the Invoicing Party.
     

The latter two attributes are also available at Remittance Advice Line level.  I think we should consider these attributes for inclusion in UBL2.0 as they are specific references to documents outside the procurement process.

At Line level, the Remittance Advice references other documents in two ways.  One way is for referencing billing documents that effectively adjust the amounts paid.  This is done via a 0..* class giving details of the adjustment (Adjustment Detail); each use of this class has a 0..1 relationship with an Adjustment Document.  I think this is quite neat and we should consider it.  (I also think there’s a mistake in the BIE description of this element)

The other way is for each Remittance Advice Line to reference 0..1 Document Reference Details (non billing document).  At first this appears to be only a (Remittance) Line to (e.g. Order) Document relationship and it could be used that way as per UBL2.0.  However this is confused by the availability in the Document Reference class of two attributes:

• Reference Item Number - the unique number to identify an item of the referenced document
• Reference Number Item Status - the code giving the status of the item of the referenced document  (I think the attribute name of this is wrong to start with)
  

These attributes effectively allow the Remittance Advice Line to reference specific items on an order, but by their item number rather than line number.
I think this is an some kind of an anomaly and should be pointed out to TBG1, but it could be indicative that the intention was to detail which items (lines) on an order were covered by the Remittance Advice Line.

In light of this, I think  we should allow the Remittance Advice Line in UBL2.0 to reference other documents (0..1) and (for the very specific user) lines on other documents (0..1)

Regards, M



Mark Leitch
Chair – UBL PSC
Director - Tritorr Ltd
Tel.:   +44 1932 821112
Cell.:  +44 7881 822999
Mail:   ml@tritorr.com
Site:   www.tritorr.com