Invoicing
A draft is a working document. An issued invoice is evidence.
Not every sale happens at a counter. When you invoice a company, the same rule that governs the ledger governs the invoice: before it is issued anything may change, and after it is issued nothing may, including by us. A mistake is corrected by a credit note that names the invoice it undoes.
Issue
The number is allocated in the same breath as the status.
Allocating the number and changing the status happen in one transaction, which is what keeps the sequence gapless. If anything after that fails, the number goes back into the sequence. A hole in a Finnish invoice sequence is a question an auditor asks years later, when nobody remembers the answer, and the cheapest time to not have that hole is now.
- ▪A draft that came to nothing can be thrown away. An issued one cannot
- ▪An issued invoice reads its own snapshot of both parties, so a later address change does not rewrite history
- ▪A draft follows the live customer, because a draft is still being written
Issued · corrected in full
Corrections
A credit note is an invoice for a negative amount, and it is treated like one.
The correction carries the number of the invoice it undoes, on its face. That is what the law expects, and it is what makes the numbering walkable years later.
When a credit note covers its original in full, both leave the open balance. Settling only the original would leave the credit note sitting there alone, showing money owed to a customer who was never charged.
An issued invoice has a number in a sequence somebody may have to walk. The way to undo it is a document that says so, not a row that quietly disappears.
One invoice · four shapes
One arithmetic
Four documents that cannot disagree by a cent.
The screen, the printable document, the Peppol UBL and the Finvoice file are all built from the same subject and the same totals, computed once under the EN 16931 rules. This is the whole reason the calculation lives in one place.
The day two of them round differently, your customer's ledger disagrees with yours by a cent and neither side can say which is right. That conversation costs more than the feature.
Getting paid
The number your customer types is the number that matches.
The Finnish reference: digits only, one check digit, weights 7-3-1. Nobody quotes an invoice number in a bank transfer, they type the reference, and the accounting software matches on it.
The ISO 11649 creditor reference for anything crossing a border, generated from the same base so the domestic and international forms stay in step.
The document
In your customer's language, never your browser's.
The invoice comes out in the customer's language, falling back to your own. Deliberately never the browser's: the person clicking download is not the person who has to read what comes out, and a browser header describes the wrong one of the two.
A Finnish shop invoicing a Danish customer sends a Danish document without anyone having to remember to switch anything.
One invoice · the customer decides the language
The limit
We build the e-invoice file. We do not yet send it.
Peppol needs an access point agreement and Finvoice needs a bank or an operator. Building the file is the part that is code; reaching the network is the part that is a contract.
So today you download a valid Peppol UBL or Finvoice XML and hand it to the operator you already use, or send the PDF. Calling this "Peppol-enabled" before that contract exists would be a sales sentence rather than a true one, and this is not a site that writes those.
What else we do not have yet →Questions about invoicing.
Can we start our numbering where our old system stopped?
Yes, and you should. We set the starting point during onboarding so your sequence carries on where it stopped, because two invoices with the same number in one year is the sort of thing that is cheap to avoid and expensive to explain.
Does an invoice go into the same ledger as counter sales?
They are separate documents with separate rules, and both end up in the same books. A counter sale is sealed the instant it is rung; an invoice is evidence from the moment it is issued. The VAT from both lands in the same period, in the same export.
What happens if we issue an invoice to the wrong customer?
You issue a credit note that names it, and then issue a correct invoice. There is no path that edits or deletes the original, for us or for you, which is exactly the property that makes the sequence worth anything.