Going live mid-year: SST, e-Invoice and your first invoice in Cloudby

Last updated: August 22, 2026

Guides: Getting started

A full, hands-on walkthrough for a Malaysian business switching to Cloudby partway through the year: from your very first login, through SST and e-Invoice setup, to issuing and e-Invoicing your first sale. Written for a business owner, not an accountant. Every accounting term is explained the first time it appears.

Your Cloudby journey

1. Go live (you are here) → 2. Day-to-day operations → Multi-currency (planned), Inventory (planned), Fixed assets, Payroll → 4. Closing your financial year

A go-live journey can start here (mid-year, with opening balances) or from a fresh financial year. Both lead to the same next steps.

Who this is for: a Malaysian business that is SST-registered and e-Invoicing, moving to Cloudby mid-year rather than at the start of a new financial year. You do not need any prior bookkeeping experience. This guide explains each accounting idea in plain language as it comes up.
Scope: Malaysia. If you are starting completely fresh (a brand-new business with no prior books to bring across), see the fresh-start go-live guide instead, which covers everything here minus the opening-balances section.
Time: plan for a real working session, not five minutes. This covers a lot of ground on purpose. Get it right once and you will not need to redo it.

What you will have by the end. An organisation set up in Cloudby with your Malaysian tax settings in place, your Chart of Accounts built (the list of every account you use to record money in your business; more on this below), SST switched on, e-Invoice connected, your opening balances entered so your books are complete from your real start date, and your first sale issued and cleared as an e-Invoice.

1. Your first login, and what the dashboard is telling you

When you sign up, you will go through a short wizard: create your user account, pick which parts of Cloudby you want (your Solutions, e.g. Accounting and Invoicing), agree to the terms, then tell Cloudby a little about your organisation (its name and country at minimum; everything else is optional at this stage and can be filled in later). Check your email for a validation code as part of this. A real signup asks you to confirm your email before you can log in.

Once you are in, you land on your Dashboard. Two tabs matter most on day one:

The Welcome tab shows quick-action cards for common first tasks, things like creating a journal entry (used later in this guide for your opening balances) or managing your Chart of Accounts (used in step 3).
The Setup Guide tab is a running checklist, grouped by area (Organisation, Finance, Sales), each with a percentage complete. This is not something you must finish in order. It just tracks what is done and what still needs attention, so you always know where you stand. Keep it open in another tab as you work through this guide; watching the percentages climb is a good way to confirm you are on track.

First-login Cloudby dashboard showing the Setup Guide checklist with percent complete per area, and the Welcome tab's quick-action cards — First-login dashboard: the Setup Guide checklist (percent complete per area) alongside the Welcome tab’s quick-action cards

A note on what “modules” means. Cloudby is organised into modules (Accounting, Sales, Purchase, HR, and so on), and you only pay for and see the ones you actually subscribed to. This guide assumes at least Accounting and Sales/Invoicing. If a menu or dashboard tile mentioned later does not appear for you, it is probably just a module you have not subscribed to, not something broken.

2. Set your financial year (yes, even starting mid-year)

Before anything else, a quick concept: your financial year (also called a fiscal year) is the 12-month period your accounts and tax filings run on. Most Malaysian SMEs run a calendar financial year, January to December, but yours might run differently (say, July to June). Check with your accountant or your company’s registration if you are not sure. All Cloudby needs from you here is your Financial Year End: a day and a month, set once under Menu > Finance > Settings > Financial. That is genuinely the entire setup for this: two dropdowns, nothing more.

The mid-year question, answered. If you are moving to Cloudby partway through your financial year rather than at the very start of it, you might expect to need some special “starting mid-year” setting. You do not. Cloudby does not ask which month you are starting in at all. You simply set your Financial Year End as above, then start recording your real transactions from whatever date you actually go live. There is nothing to configure, and nothing that will stop you posting a transaction dated, say, 1 July when your financial year runs January to December. Set the date, and move on.

3. Build your Chart of Accounts

Here is a term worth explaining properly, since everything else in this guide sits on top of it: a Chart of Accounts is simply the complete list of “buckets” your business uses to record money: a bucket for your bank balance, a bucket for money customers owe you, a bucket for sales income, a bucket for rent expense, and so on. Every transaction you ever record in Cloudby (an invoice, a payment, a journal entry) moves an amount between two or more of these buckets. Accountants call each bucket a ledger or account; this guide uses “account” and “ledger” interchangeably, matching what you will see on screen.

You do not have to build this list from scratch. Go to Menu > Finance > Chart of Accounts > Setup Wizard and choose Chart of account builder. You will see two things: a live preview of the resulting account list on the left, and a category tree on the right. Pick one base template that matches your business (Trading, Services, Manufacturing, or NGO/Society), then look for Malaysia (Add-on) and expand it. You will find four separate chapters you can add on top of your base: Corporate, Sole Prop/Partner, SST & WHT, and Payroll (MY). Pick the ones that apply to you; for most SST-registered SMEs without payroll in Cloudby yet, that is your business-type base plus SST & WHT.

Chart of account builder with Malaysia (Add-on) expanded showing its four chapters and SST & WHT selected, with the Select all button visible before applying — Chart of account builder: the category tree with Malaysia (Add-on) expanded to its four chapters, and the “Select all” checkbox highlighted

Do not skip this: click “Select all.” When you pick a chapter like SST & WHT, Cloudby shows you the individual accounts it is about to add, as a checklist, and that checklist starts with nothing ticked. If you click Apply Changes without ticking anything first (or clicking Select all), Cloudby cheerfully tells you “Chart of accounts has been applied,” but it added zero accounts. There is no warning that nothing happened. Always click Select all (or tick the specific accounts you want) before Apply Changes, for every chapter you add.

4. Switch on SST

A quick refresher, since this guide assumes no prior tax background: SST stands for Sales and Service Tax, Malaysia’s two-part indirect tax. If you added the SST & WHT chapter in step 3, the tax groups you need (Service Tax, Sales Tax at its various rates, and the exemption codes) are already created for you, and the current 8% Service Tax rate is already active by default. You do not need to manually bump anything up from an old rate. What you do need to check is one specific field.

Check the Type Code on your Service Tax item. Go to Menu > Finance > Tax > Tax, find Service Tax Standard, and open its Rates tab. You will likely find its Type Code field pre-filled with something like B1_10 & B2_11C. That is a reference to a box on Malaysia’s SST-02 tax return form, not the code e-Invoicing actually needs. Replace it with a real MyInvois tax classification code: 02 for Service Tax (or 01 for Sales Tax, 06 for not-applicable/exempt, on the relevant items). This matters later: every e-Invoice line needs a correct code here to pass validation.

For the full detail on SST in Cloudby (exemptions, filing the SST-02, day-to-day tax handling on your documents), see the dedicated SST guide. This section only covers what you need to get through the rest of this journey.

5. Connect e-Invoice

Another quick refresher: e-Invoice (run by LHDN through a system called MyInvois) is Malaysia’s electronic invoicing mandate. Instead of just handing a customer a PDF invoice, an e-Invoice is submitted electronically and validated by LHDN before it counts as a legally recognised document. Go to Menu > Finance > Settings > e-Invoice. You will find a Main tab (choose Provider = Malaysia LHDN, and set a Commence Date, which should match your real go-live date) and a Malaysia LHDN tab where you fill in your business’s own tax identity: TIN, BRN, SST number, and address. You will also need to search for your MSIC code here, a standard industry classification code. Just type a few words describing what your business does and pick the closest match from the real, searchable list.

Testing before you go live. Cloudby has a genuine sandbox mode for rehearsing your e-Invoice setup safely before any document counts for real. Look for the connection mode option on this screen and start there rather than connecting live on day one. While testing, Cloudby still asks for Client ID and Secret fields to be filled in before it will save. If you do not have real MyInvois credentials yet, fill in placeholder text just to get past the validation, and come back once you have your real ones from the MyInvois portal.

Once your identity fields are filled in, run the Compliance Checker (under Menu > Settings > Organisation). This is worth using properly, not skimming past: it checks your Chart of Accounts, Tax, and e-Invoice setup against what a real submission needs, and shows a clear Pass/Warn/Fail per item, with a plain-language explanation of what is wrong and what to do about it. Some issues even have a one-click Fix button. Work through anything marked Fail; a Warn is often fine to leave (for example, a note that you are still connected to LHDN’s testing environment is exactly what you want while you are testing, not a problem).

The Compliance Checker showing Chart of Accounts, Tax and e-Invoice domain cards with Pass/Warn/Fail counts, and an item expanded with Impact copy and a one-click Fix button — The Compliance Checker: Chart of Accounts / Tax / e-Invoice domain cards with Pass/Warn/Fail counts, one item expanded showing its Impact and a one-click Fix button

For the full e-Invoice picture (the document lifecycle, receiving supplier e-Invoices, the recommended flow for an SME), see the dedicated e-Invoice guide.

6. Add your first customer

Go to Menu > Customer > Company > New Company and add the business or person you are about to invoice: name, registration number, address, and so on. For just one or two customers to get started, entering them by hand here is simpler than a bulk import; if you have an existing customer list to bring across later, see importing data.

Why your first e-Invoice will say “Consolidated Buyer,” not your customer’s name. Right now, Cloudby’s customer record does not have a place to capture a customer’s own tax ID (their TIN), a field MyInvois requires to submit an e-Invoice addressed to a specific, named buyer. Until that is added, the practical path for your day-to-day invoicing is Malaysia’s Consolidated e-Invoice mechanism instead: rather than naming each buyer individually, your sales for a period are reported together under a general “consolidated buyer.” This is a real, legitimate part of how e-Invoicing works in Malaysia (commonly used for consumer-facing sales), not a workaround unique to Cloudby. It just means your very first e-Invoice will look a little different from what you might expect. Step 8 below walks through exactly how this looks.

7. Enter your opening balances

This is the section worth taking slowly, so here is the concept from the ground up.

Because you are moving to Cloudby partway through your financial year, your business already has money, debts, and assets that exist from before your Cloudby go-live date: cash in the bank, amounts customers still owe you, equipment you own, and so on. If you only started recording transactions from your go-live date forward, your Cloudby books would be missing everything that happened before it, and your reports would be wrong (your bank balance in Cloudby would show only what you deposited after go-live, not what was actually in the account). An opening balance is simply how you bring all of that starting position into Cloudby in one go, dated as of your cutover date, so your books are complete from day one.

The way you record an opening balance in Cloudby is a Journal Entry. If that term is new to you: a journal entry is just a record that moves amounts between the “buckets” (accounts) from step 3. Every journal entry has two sides that must add up to the exact same total: a Debit side and a Credit side. This might sound arbitrary, but it is really just a consistency check built into the system: money (or anything of value) always has to come from somewhere and go somewhere, so the two sides balancing is what keeps the whole picture honest. You do not need to memorise which account types go on which side. Cloudby’s account-picker and the running total at the bottom of the entry make it obvious as you go, and the entry will not let you post until both sides match.

Go to Menu > Finance > Journal Entry > New, date it as of your cutover date, and add one line per thing you are bringing across: your bank balance, any cash on hand, amounts owed to you by customers, equipment or vehicles you own, and so on. Each goes on the Debit side, since these are all things of value your business holds. To balance it, add one final line on the Credit side to a general “Capital” or “Opening Balance Equity” account, for whatever amount makes the two sides equal. Think of that last line as a placeholder representing “everything this business was worth on day one.” It is a completely standard bookkeeping step, not something specific to Cloudby.

A posted opening-balance Journal Entry with seven lines covering bank, cash, receivables and fixed assets, with matching Debit and Credit totals — A multi-line opening-balance Journal Entry: bank, cash, receivables and a fixed asset on the Debit side, Capital on the Credit side, with the running Debit/Credit totals matching before submission

One prerequisite, easy to miss. Cloudby will not let you save any Journal Entry, including this one, until your e-Invoice Provider is set (step 5’s Main tab, at minimum). If saving fails here, that is almost always why; go back and complete at least the Main tab of e-Invoice setup first.

Once posted, verify it. Go to Menu > Finance > Explorer > Trial Balance, a report that lists every account and its balance, with a total Debit column and a total Credit column that should match exactly (this is the same balancing check as your journal entry, just applied to your whole set of books at once; accountants call this “the books tying out”). Set the report’s period to cover your cutover date. It defaults to an unrelated period, so if you leave it as-is you may see an empty report and wrongly think your entry did not save.

Trial Balance report for the cutover period showing every opening-balance account with matching Debit and Credit totals — Trial Balance for the cutover period, showing every opening-balance account with matching Debit and Credit totals at the bottom

8. Issue and e-Invoice your first sale

Now the payoff: your first real transaction in Cloudby. Go to Menu > Sales > Sales Invoice > New, pick the customer you added in step 6, and add a line for what you are selling: a product or a service, with its price. Reveal the Tax column and choose the correct tax group (Service Tax Standard, for most services); Cloudby calculates the tax for you and shows the total. This is worth a moment’s appreciation: you never type a tax amount yourself anywhere in Cloudby, you just pick the right tax group on the line and the arithmetic happens for you.

When you confirm the invoice, that confirmation is the e-Invoice submission. There is no separate “now submit it” step. You will see an e-Invoice action choice on the document: choose Consolidate, for the reason explained in step 6. Confirm, and Cloudby submits it.

A confirmed Sales Invoice with Service Tax correctly calculated on the line and the Consolidate e-Invoice action selected — A confirmed Sales Invoice: the tax correctly calculated on the line, and the Consolidate e-Invoice action selected

Give it a few minutes, then open the e-Invoice document from the invoice (or from Menu > Finance > E-Invoice) to watch its status. A real submission moves from a sending/pending state to Accepted once LHDN has validated it. At that point, it is a legally recognised document, and you can open it to see the official version Cloudby holds, including the seller and buyer details LHDN itself received.

The e-Invoice document detail view showing status Accepted, with the seller and consolidated buyer details both visible — The e-Invoice document detail view showing status Accepted, with the seller and buyer blocks (Buyer shown as the consolidated general-public buyer, as explained above)

9. What’s next

At this point you have a real, working Malaysian organisation in Cloudby: SST configured, e-Invoice connected, your starting position brought across as an opening balance, and one sale already through the full cycle. A few honest notes as you keep going:

Your dashboard’s Revenue tile shows only the current calendar month. If you just did your opening balance and first invoice partway through a month, do not be alarmed if it briefly reads RM0.00. Check the trend chart just below it, which shows your real figures by month.
Keep the Setup Guide checklist from step 1 open as you add more customers, products, and settings over your first few weeks. It is a good running To Do list, not a one-time thing.
Once you are confident everything is correct, come back to e-Invoice setup and switch your connection from testing to live, so future documents count for real with LHDN.

For the deeper material on each part of this journey, see the SST guide and the e-Invoice guide, and the Taxation reference for how tax fits into Cloudby generally.

Scenarios and troubleshooting

I clicked Apply Changes on the Chart of Accounts wizard and nothing showed up.

You almost certainly did not click Select all (or tick individual rows) before Apply Changes. The checklist starts empty and applies nothing if left untouched, with no warning. Go back into the wizard and redo it, ticking the accounts you want first.

My Journal Entry will not save.

Check that your e-Invoice Provider is set (Menu > Finance > Settings > e-Invoice, Main tab), even if this particular journal entry has nothing to do with e-Invoicing. Cloudby currently requires this to be configured before it will let you save any journal entry.

My Trial Balance looks empty after I posted my opening balance.

The report defaults to an unrelated period. Set the Period fields to cover your cutover date and re-run it.

Why does my e-Invoice show “Consolidated Buyer” instead of my customer’s name?

See step 6 above. Cloudby cannot yet capture a customer’s tax ID, so individual e-Invoices addressed to a named buyer are not currently possible. Consolidated e-Invoicing is a real, legitimate alternative, not a workaround; your invoice itself still correctly shows your actual customer.

Do I need an accountant to do this?

Not to follow this guide. Every step here is designed to be done by a business owner. That said, if your books are complex (multiple bank accounts, existing debts to specific suppliers, fixed assets with depreciation already running), it is worth having an accountant check your opening balance figures before you post them, even if you enter them yourself.

FAQ

Do I have to start mid-year, or should I wait for a new financial year?
Either works, and Cloudby has no preference. Waiting for a new financial year means no opening-balance journal entry to prepare, which is simpler; starting mid-year means you do not have to wait, at the cost of the one journal entry in step 7. Most businesses find switching as soon as they are ready is worth that one extra step.

What if I get my opening balance journal entry wrong?
You can post a correcting journal entry afterward, the same way you would fix any other mistake in double-entry bookkeeping. It is worth getting it right the first time by checking your figures against your previous system’s own reports before you post, but a mistake here is not unfixable.

Does Cloudby file anything with LHDN or Customs for me automatically?
e-Invoice submission itself is automatic once you confirm a document. Tax returns are not: the SST-02 is still filed by you on the MySST portal (see the SST guide), using figures Cloudby prepares for you.

Still stuck? Message us on WhatsApp or email hello@cloudby.co and we will walk you through it.