nLIGHT | Input VAT invoice platform, supplier invoice review

Enterprise overview

nLIGHT Technology (Shanghai) Co., Ltd. was established in 2004 and is a wholly foreign-owned enterprise invested in China by the U.S. company nLIGHT. Its headquarters is located in the China (Shanghai) Pilot Free Trade Zone, and it is mainly engaged in the R&D, production, and sales of fiber lasers, semiconductor lasers, and solid-state lasers. Its products include fiber-coupled semiconductor laser modules, LD single emitters, semiconductor laser stacks, fiber lasers, Yb/Er-doped fibers, passive fibers, etc., and customized products can be provided according to customer needs. They are widely used in material processing, pumping of solid-state and fiber lasers, laser medical treatment, scientific research, and other fields.

Business pain points

• Procurement in the manufacturing stage is spread across raw materials, parts, molds and tooling, equipment spare parts, outsourced processing, and logistics. Suppliers include both large manufacturers with long-term agreements and small and micro suppliers providing temporary replenishment, with varying invoice types and arrival rhythms. After invoices arrive, business personnel print and paste them and submit them to finance on paper; finance completes verification and registration centrally at the document receipt stage. Invoice management processes and reimbursement and payment processes each run separately, connected manually in between. The same transaction may have both a paper printout and a fully digitalized e-invoice source file, making duplicate booking difficult to eliminate at the process level.
• The correspondence between invoices and purchase orders and goods receipt notes relies on manual maintenance, and discrepancies must be traced back item by item, lengthening the reconciliation cycle. Manual entry itself is a source of errors; one wrong entry propagates through certification, deduction, and vouchers all the way down
• Supplier invoicing status cannot be grasped in real time, and enterprises can only passively receive notifications after risks occur. After China Golden Tax Phase IV, tax comparison has become fully quantitative; once the authenticity and compliance of input VAT invoices have problems, they directly affect deduction and cost recognition, and the frequency of enterprises being questioned by tax authorities increases markedly

Solutions

• Connect invoice collection, authenticity verification, duplicate checking, certification, posting, and archiving into one online process, eliminating paper circulation and manual registration steps
• Establish compliance validation rules for all invoices; abnormal invoices are blocked and returned to the handler at the submission stage, no longer discovered only at certification
• Connect with the financial system's voucher generation link, automatically associate documents with accounts payable and expense vouchers, and allow vouchers to trace back to original invoices
• Ultimately shifts finance from processing invoices one by one to handling only exceptions, ensuring full input VAT deduction where applicable, with a fully compliant and traceable process
• And enabling business, finance, and tax to work on the same set of data, so business initiation, financial review, and tax compliance no longer each use their own standards