Like most businesses, we sell something, we deliver it, we raise an invoice, we send it to our buyer, we get paid - we hope.

The Master Agreement between us and our counterparty will specify if we raise an invoice for a specific delivery (of oil for example), or for a continuously delivered commodity (gas or power for example) over a period (usually a day, week or month)

Detail

The two main invoicing schedules are:

• Monthly - all of the commodity that has delivered to a counterparty at a location in the last month is invoiced shortly after the end of the month. The invoice will include all trades that have delivered during the calendar month. Trades delivering over multiple months will appear on successive invoices. Each invoice will only relate to the delivery of each trade within that month
• Delivery - typically oil is invoiced a few days after a physical shipment has occurred

Invoices usually have the following granularity:

• Delivery period or delivery
• Commodity
• Currency
• Location
• Counterparty (of course!)

We may therefore raise a number of invoices for a counterparty, with different combinations of the above

Once we generate, or raise, an invoice, and are satisfied that it is correct, we transmit the invoice(s) to our counterparty, and we post the invoice(s) into an Account in our General Ledger

We expect our counterparty to be doing the same for commodities that we have bought from them, and expect to receive invoice(s) that we will check against our own records

To help this we raise a set of shadow invoices, or purchase orders, so that we can compare these to the invoices received from our counterparty. Once agreed we post these purchase orders into an Account in our General Ledger