IRD / CBMS Sync
eBilling Lite reports your bills to the Inland Revenue Department's Central Billing Monitoring System (CBMS) for you. It happens automatically in the background, but this screen lets you watch the status, fix anything that did not go through, look a bill up in the IRD register, and lets your customers verify a bill is genuine. This page explains all of it.
Every tax invoice and credit note you issue is reported to CBMS automatically. Debit notes are internal purchase returns and are not sent. Demo documents are never sent - only real, live documents are.
Connecting to the IRD
Before anything syncs, your IRD CBMS credentials must be set under Settings → IRD Credentials: your IRD username and password, your seller PAN, and the environment.
| Setting | What it does |
|---|---|
| Environment: Test | Sends to the IRD's test portal. Use it while practising or verifying the connection - test bills do not count as real filings. |
| Environment: Production | Sends to the live IRD portal. Switch to this only when you go live. |
| Test connection | Checks your credentials against the IRD before you rely on automatic sync. Always do this after entering or changing credentials. |
The sync lifecycle
Each reportable document moves through three states:
| Status | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Pending | Saved and queued, not yet confirmed by the IRD. This is the normal state for a few moments after you save. |
| Sent / Synced | The IRD has accepted and recorded the document. Nothing more to do. |
| Failed | The attempt did not get through (the IRD was unreachable, or rejected it). It is retried automatically, and you can re-sync it by hand. |
Syncing is about reporting to the IRD, not about whether the customer's copy is real. The bill you gave the customer is valid the moment it is issued. Sync status just tells you the reporting is (or is not yet) done.
The IRD screen
From the IRD menu you have three views:
- Status
- An overview of how many documents are synced, pending or failed - your at-a-glance health check. Review it at the end of the day to confirm everything reported.
- Outbox
- The queue of documents waiting to be sent or that failed, with the reason. This is where you act on anything stuck.
- Credentials
- A shortcut to your IRD credentials.
Sending and re-sending by hand
- Sync now - push a specific invoice (or credit note) to the IRD immediately rather than waiting for the background run.
- Re-sync - retry a document whose status is Failed, after you have addressed the cause.
Looking a bill up in the IRD register
You can query the IRD's own record of a bill from within eBilling Lite - useful to confirm the IRD holds what you think it does. By a bill number you can:
- Look up the invoice as the IRD recorded it.
- View the IRD audit trail for it.
- Open the IRD PDF for the bill.
The public verifier
Every issued invoice, credit note and debit note carries a verification link (and QR code) on its print. Anyone - a customer, an auditor - can open it without logging in and see that the document is genuine and unaltered, because each is digitally signed when issued.
| To verify a… | They open |
|---|---|
| Tax invoice | the invoice verification link / scan its QR code |
| Credit note | the credit-note verification link |
| Debit note | the debit-note verification link |
The digital signature is what makes the verifier trustworthy: if a single figure on a bill were altered, the signature would no longer match and verification would fail. It is the technical backbone of the immutability you read about in Getting Started.
Troubleshooting failed sync
- A document stays Pending for a long time.
- The IRD portal may be slow or briefly down. It retries automatically; check the Status view later, or use Sync now to push it.
- A document shows Failed.
- Open the Outbox to read the reason. Common causes are wrong IRD credentials or the IRD portal being unavailable. Fix the cause (for example correct the credentials and test the connection), then re-sync.
- Nothing is syncing at all.
- Confirm your IRD credentials are set and the environment is correct (Production when live), and run the test connection. Remember demo documents never sync.
- The customer says verification fails.
- Make sure they are scanning the QR on the original issued bill. If a genuine bill will not verify, contact your provider - do not reissue it without checking.