Invoicing for the workshop

What has to be on the invoice is decided where you are

These English pages are read across the EU and EEA, and every one of those countries runs its own rules on what an invoice must carry. We do not set them, and we will not compress them into one reassuring paragraph — a paragraph that is true everywhere is useful nowhere.

What we can tell you is what the software carries by itself, because that part is the same wherever you are: customer and vehicle, a sequential number, the dates, the positions with their tax rates, the totals, and the electronic address the European norm makes mandatory on both sides.

What your country may add on top — an extra identifier, a required wording, a threshold below which a shorter document is enough — is one conversation with your accountant. Have it once, at setup, and the answer sits in the template forever. Skip it, and the gap is not on one invoice, it is on every invoice of the month, because a template error repeats without ever announcing itself.

The vehicle detail is worth a line of its own: a workshop invoice that names the vehicle and its mileage stays usable years later, when a customer disputes a repair or sells the car. Whether that is required where you are is a national question. Whether it is useful is not.

Estimate, approval, invoice — one set of positions

The estimate and the invoice are built from the same positions, which sounds like a technical detail and is actually the whole customer conversation. When the two documents come from one source you can show which position moved and why. When they are written separately, a difference at the counter is a discussion about honesty rather than about a part.

Partial invoices and credit notes come from the same place, for the same reason: the moment a second document is written by hand beside the first, the two stop agreeing and nobody can say which is right.

Whether an estimate is legally required where you are is a national question, and across most of what these pages reach we do not claim that it is. But that is beside the point commercially. An estimate is measured by three things a system can actually move — how fast it leaves after the customer asks, how readable it is for someone comparing two workshops, and how often it is accepted. A duty you endure; a fast estimate you turn into a job.

Tracked time and fitted parts become the lines

If you arrived here searching for invoicing software, this is the block worth the visit — because it is the one thing an invoicing program cannot do, however good it is.

An invoicing program does not know what happened on the lift. It waits for someone to tell it, in the evening, from memory or from a slip. Reconstructed times are systematically too low, and a part fitted at four o'clock is a part somebody has to remember at six.

Here the direction is reversed. Start/stop time tracking per work step becomes a labour line at your rate. Parts booked out to the job become part lines. The quality check closes the job, and the invoice is what falls out of it. Nobody retypes anything, because there is nothing left to retype.

That is also the honest test of whether you need us for this at all: if your invoices already come out of your job sheet without anyone copying figures across, invoicing is not your problem and a new invoicing program will not find you one. If they do not — if the plate is written at intake, copied onto the parts order and typed a third time at billing — then the invoice was never the problem either. The transferring was.

Warranty, guarantee and goodwill still belong on the invoice

Three different things sit behind one word in daily use, and the difference is only ever about who pays: the customer, a manufacturer or importer under a guarantee, or you, out of goodwill. Whichever it is, the work is written up the same way — and it goes onto the document with its value shown and the reduction shown beside it, rather than being left off.

That is a habit rather than a rule, and it is worth three things:

• The customer sees what he did not pay for. That is the entire commercial value of goodwill, and it evaporates completely if the line is invisible. An hour written off silently buys you nothing.
• The vehicle history stays complete. A repair that is not on any document did not happen, as far as the next dispute is concerned — and warranty work is exactly the work that gets disputed.
• Your own figures stay honest. Unpaid work that is never recorded makes your productive hours look better than they are, and productive hours are what an hourly rate is calculated from. That is one of the quieter ways a shop rate ends up too low; the labour rate calculator shows how directly the two are connected.

Mechanically nothing special is needed: a line at zero, or at a reduced price, is an ordinary line item with the description doing the explaining.

The legal half is not ours to write and no period appears here. How long you answer for your own repair, and what a manufacturer's guarantee obliges beyond that, is national and differs across every country these pages reach. It is one question for your accountant or lawyer, asked once. What is the same everywhere is that the answer is worth nothing without the documents to go with it — which is the argument for putting the work on the invoice in the first place.

Sequential numbers, locking, and the second document

An issued invoice is not edited. It is corrected by a second document. That is the rule behind sequential numbering without gaps and behind locking, and it is the one place where a workshop's habits and a spreadsheet's habits genuinely conflict: the quick fix in the file is exactly what an audit is looking for, and it is exactly what a spreadsheet makes effortless.

What that means in practice is undramatic. An invoice that went out wrong gets a correction that references it, both stay in the sequence, and the history shows what happened rather than hiding it. The customer sees a correction rather than a different version of the same number, which is easier to explain, not harder.

That unbroken sequence is also the reason billing is the last thing to move when you change systems, and the one part of a switch nobody can repair after the fact. How to sequence the rest of the move is on the main product page.

Payment terms, and who looks at what is still open

Most workshop invoices are settled when the car is collected, which is why this subject feels small until it is not. The ones that stay open are almost entirely third-party invoices — fleets, leasing companies, insurers, public buyers, the subject of the block that follows this one — and they are also the largest.

The legal half is national and no figure for it is written here. When payment falls due without an agreement, what interest may be charged, what a reminder has to contain before it has any effect — those differ across every country these pages reach, and a number that was right for one reader would be wrong for most. Ask once, then set it once.

What is not national is the part that actually goes wrong:

• A payment term that is not on the invoice is not a term. Whatever your country's default is, an unstated term is an argument rather than an agreement.
• The term is a setting, not a decision per document. It sits once in your invoice profile and the due date follows from it, overridable on the individual invoice when a customer genuinely has different terms. Decided per invoice, it will drift.
• Somebody has to look. An invoice is a draft, open, paid or cancelled, and it becomes paid when a human marks it so. The open list is therefore exactly as true as the last time anyone maintained it — which is an argument for a fixed day of the week, not for more software.

And the part we owe you plainly: there are no automatic payment reminders today. No reminder schedule, no escalation stages, no interest calculation. If chasing money is the job you are hoping to hand over, this is not the part of the product that does it, and it is better to know that now than in week two. What you get is the list, the dates on it, and the fact that the invoice existed the moment the job was closed rather than three weeks later — which is the more common reason a workshop gets paid late.

When somebody other than the driver pays

Fleets, leasing companies and insurers change one thing about an invoice and nothing about the job: the vehicle and the work stay attached to your customer, and the document goes to whoever is paying. Keeping those two apart is the whole discipline here, because a job filed under the payer loses the vehicle history that made it worth having.

What that needs in practice:

• A recipient of its own. Name, address, email and tax identifier of the payer sit on the invoice, while the job stays where it belongs. Merging the two into one customer record is the shortcut that costs you the vehicle's history a year later.
• The payer's reference on the document. A claim number, an order number, a cost centre — the norm has a field for it, and a third-party invoice without it is an invoice somebody has to chase before they can even file it.
• Approval before the work, in writing, on the job. A third party who did not approve does not pay, and the person standing in front of you when that becomes clear is the customer, not the insurer. This is the same estimate-and-approval chain as any other job — it simply has a different person at the approving end.
• An excess split into two documents from one set of positions. One to the payer, one to the customer, both traceable to the same job, so the two figures cannot drift apart.

One thing to expect from these customers rather than fear: they are the first to ask for a structured invoice, because their own systems want one. The e-invoicing page covers what that means. And they are also the invoices that stay open longest, which is what the block on payment terms just above this one is about.

Your accountant, and the connection we do not have

Plainly, before you find it in a trial: there is no direct link to Xero or QuickBooks today. Not to either of them, and not to an equivalent. In every English-speaking market a bookkeeping connection is table stakes, and it is the most common follow-up question we are asked — which is exactly why it belongs in the copy rather than in an answer to an email.

What comes out instead is the PDF and the structured EN 16931 file: a machine-readable document a modern bookkeeping package can read in. For a monthly hand-over to an accountant that is usually enough. For a live two-way sync with a ledger it is not, and we are not going to describe it as if it were.

Where a real integration is missing, a clean export is the second-best answer and often the more honest one. A file your accountant reads without rework saves more time than a connection that jams twice a year and then belongs to nobody — that is a real pattern, not a consolation. But it is second best, and if a ledger connection is the deciding criterion for you, ask us for the current state before you decide rather than after.

Keeping it — and where our part stops

Two directions, one rule. For the invoices you issue and the ones you receive, the structured file is the original and the printout is a copy. A folder on a desktop is not an archive: what is asked for is that an issued document cannot be quietly altered afterwards, and that it can still be found years later.

How long is national, and we do not name a period. The countries these pages reach do not share one, and a number written here would be wrong for most readers. What we can say is where the duty and the contract part company: the retention duty runs on after you cancel a software contract. Settle before you sign how you get everything out and in what form — otherwise the retention duty quietly turns into a subscription you cannot cancel.

And the boundary this page owes you, because it is the page most people arrive on. What we generate is an EN 16931 invoice in the Peppol BIS Billing 3.0 profile, straight from the job. What we do not do is route it: national clearance platforms such as SdI, KSeF or Verifactu are not covered, and there is no Peppol access point behind the export. In business-to-business that changes nothing — you send the file. To a public buyer it is the missing piece. The e-invoicing page sets out that line in full, including the two countries where our own research is still open.