Reviewing and filing for your clients

Businesses record their own trade. You are the compliance gate between what they record and what the Federal Board of Revenue receives. Every sales invoice and credit note stops in your queue. You approve it and file it, or send it back with a reason. You also hold the accounting powers a business owner does not have: manual journal vouchers, opening balances, and locking a month once it is filed.

You work across several clients from one login. Everything you open is scoped to the client you have selected, and every action you take is recorded against your name.

Go to /lawyer and sign in. You land on the command centre, which covers every client assigned to you.

Most screens carry a client selector at the top. Choose a client and the page shows only their data; the choice follows you as you move between screens. The review queue is the exception — it deliberately spans all your clients, because the work is to clear the backlog, not to work one client at a time.

The sidebar

Your opening screen answers one question: what needs me today.

Figures across all clients

Client table

One row per client: pending count, oldest item, FBR environment, sandbox progress, last filing, and whether their current month is locked. Click a row to work on that client.

You are notified when the queue grows past a healthy size, when a document has waited too long, and when FBR rejects something you filed.

Review → Review queue is where the day's work lives. It lists every sales invoice and credit note awaiting a decision, across all your clients, oldest first.

Each row shows the client, document type and number, date, customer, total, sales tax, how long it has waited, and whether FBR validation has already been run and passed.

Filters

• Client — work one business at a time when that suits you.
• Document type — invoices or credit notes.
• Waiting over — 1, 2 or 7 days, to find what is going stale.
• FBR pre-check — passed, failed, or never run. Filtering to "passed" gives you the fastest run of approvals.
• Amount over — review the large ones first when time is short.

Approving in bulk

Select rows and use Approve and submit to clear a batch. The system still checks each one individually and files them one at a time. Anything that fails is left in the queue with its reason attached, so a bulk action can never quietly file something broken.

Opening a document from the queue gives you everything needed to decide, on one page, without clicking away.

Validate with FBR is available here too. Running it before you approve turns most rejections into something you fix while the client is still able to act on it.

A comment is mandatory on request-changes and on reject, and it is the only thing the client will read. Write what is wrong and what to do about it. "Line 2 HS code 8471.3000 is for computers; these are printer cartridges, use 8443.9990" ends the exchange. "Wrong HS code" starts another one.

The system checks arithmetic and structure. You check judgement. In practice these are where filings go wrong.

Buyer

• NTN is seven digits, CNIC is thirteen. A registered buyer must carry an NTN.
• Registration type matches reality. An unregistered buyer treated as registered is a straightforward rejection.
• The province is right; it affects the applicable regime.

Lines

• The HS code matches the goods actually sold. This is the single most common FBR rejection, usually error 0052.
• The sale type agrees with the tax treatment. Zero-rated goods taxed at standard rate, or the reverse, will not pass.
• Reduced-rate and exempt lines carry the SRO schedule number and serial that justify them.
• Third-schedule goods are valued at retail price, not at the sale price.
• The unit of measure comes from FBR's list, not from the client's own vocabulary.

The document as a whole

• The date falls in an open period.
• A credit note references the original invoice's FBR number and carries a reason. Without the reference FBR returns error 0026.
• Withholding, where present, is at the right section and rate.

Approving and submitting builds the payload from the document, signs it with the client's token, and posts it to the right endpoint for their environment. Sandbox and production are separate credentials and separate endpoints; the system picks from the client's configuration, never from a choice you make in the moment.

What comes back

Two safeguards worth knowing

Every submission carries an idempotency key, so retrying a call that already succeeded returns the original acceptance rather than filing a duplicate. And transient network failures are retried with an increasing delay, while a clear rejection from FBR is never retried.

Sandbox before production

A new client works in sandbox until they have passed the scenarios that apply to their business activity and sector. The administrator runs those scenarios from the admin panel: each one files a test invoice, approved in the administrator's name, so they do not pass through your queue. You will see the resulting documents, buyer and products in the client's lists marked Sandbox test; leave them alone — they are purged before the client goes live. Their progress is on the command centre; the administrator makes the move to production once it is complete.

A rejection lands back on the document with FBR's own code and message. The codes you will see most:

Where the fix belongs to the client, send it back with the code and the plain-language cause. Where it belongs to a master record, correct the record yourself under client masters and the next invoice is already right.

Credit notes reduce a sale and pass through your review exactly as invoices do. They are the only way to correct an invoice FBR has accepted. Check that the reason is adequate, that the quantities do not exceed the original, and that the original FBR invoice number is attached.

Debit notes are purchase returns. They affect the client's input tax and supplier balances but are not filed with FBR, so they do not enter your queue. You can view them under client purchases when reconciling input tax.

These are the records you can edit directly, because compliance depends on them and a business owner cannot always judge them.

A verified tax profile is worth the minute it costs. It is the difference between one rejection and a pattern of them.

Purchase invoices, expenses, stock adjustments, receipts and payments are all visible to you and none of them are editable. You need them to answer questions the reports raise — where an input tax figure came from, why a bank balance moved, whether a stock write-off was documented — without being able to alter the client's own record of their trade.

If something is wrong in one of them, a journal voucher is the correct instrument, because it leaves both the original and your correction on the record.

Accounting → Journal Vouchers. This is your instrument for anything no document screen covers: depreciation, accruals and prepayments, provisions, reclassifications, corrections, year-end adjustments, and writing off a bad debt.

1. Choose the client and the date. The date must fall in an open period.
2. Add lines: account, debit or credit, and a narration on each.
3. Give the voucher a description that will still make sense to someone reading it a year from now.
4. Post. The form will not accept an unbalanced voucher.

Accounting → Journal Entries shows every entry in the client's books, automatic and manual alike, each linked to the document that produced it. Entries are never edited. A mistake is corrected by a reversal, and both remain visible.

When a client joins with existing books, their opening position is posted as a single dated entry. Confirm first that their chart of accounts, customers, suppliers, bank accounts and products carry the right figures — the opening entry is assembled from exactly those records.

Any difference between total debits and total credits goes to Owner Capital, so the entry always balances. A large unexplained difference means something upstream is wrong, and is worth chasing before you post.

Controls → Accounting periods. Locking is exclusively yours. A locked month cannot be posted to, amended, cancelled or reversed by anybody, including you, until it is unlocked.

Locking

1. Choose the client and the month.
2. The system refuses to lock while any FBR document for that month is still in flight — pending review, approved but unfiled, submitting, or in an unknown state. Clear them first.
3. Confirm. The lock is recorded with your name and the time.

Unlocking

Unlocking demands a written reason and is logged permanently. Use it when a genuine correction must land in a closed month. Prefer, where the standards allow, dating the correction in the current open month instead.

You have the same twelve reports as the business, for whichever client you have selected, each with a date range and an Excel export. All are derived from the journal, so they reconcile with one another by construction.

Per client, in this order.

1. Clear the review queue. Nothing for the month should be pending, approved-but-unfiled, or in an unknown state.
2. Resolve every FBR rejection. Either the corrected document is filed, or a credit note covers it.
3. Open the trial balance and confirm it balances.
4. Check the tax position: output tax on the ledger against what was filed, input tax against purchases and expenses.
5. Confirm bank reconciliations are complete for the month.
6. Post your adjusting vouchers — depreciation, accruals, prepayments, provisions.
7. Review the aging reports and provide for anything genuinely bad.
8. Take the closing inventory valuation for the record.
9. File the return.
10. Lock the period.

These are design decisions, not gaps.

• You cannot create sales invoices. Trade belongs to the business. Reviewing what you wrote yourself would not be a review.
• You cannot edit an issued invoice. Send it back, or raise a credit note.
• You cannot alter a posted journal entry. Reversals only, and both sides stay visible.
• You cannot see or set FBR credentials. Tokens are encrypted and held by the administrator; you file with them without ever reading them.
• You cannot reach a business you are not assigned to. Assignment is the administrator's to grant.
• You cannot delete anything. The audit trail is the product.

Document statuses

Common questions