Invoicing without a subscription: how paying per invoice works
Almost every invoicing tool wants you to create an account and pick a subscription first. For anyone who needs a single invoice that is the wrong order: you want the invoice first, and only a subscription once you invoice more often. This is how invoicing without a subscription works.
Paying per invoice
- You fill in the invoice. Without an account, straight into the document. Your own details, your client’s, the lines with a VAT rate per line.
- You look at the preview. Free, with a watermark across it. That way you see exactly how the PDF will look.
- You pay for the PDF. If everything is right, you pay €0.50 with iDEAL and download the clean PDF, or have it e-mailed straight away.
The invoice stays available for 4 hours to download again and is then deleted automatically. No profile is created for you and you get no e-mail you did not ask for.
What is on the invoice
Exactly what the Dutch tax office asks for: invoice number, date, your KVK and VAT numbers, your client’s details, the description and the VAT per rate. If you work with reverse-charged VAT or the small business scheme (KOR), the mandatory sentence is included. The VAT is rounded per rate over the summed subtotal, as is customary in the Netherlands.
What you have to remember yourself
Without a subscription nothing remembers for you. You keep the numbering yourself (each invoice one higher than the last, without gaps), you keep the PDFs for seven years and you send a reminder yourself when a client does not pay. For a few invoices a year that is perfectly doable.
When a subscription pays off after all
Once you invoice every month, the manual steps start to cost time and the chance of a numbering mistake grows. A plan from €2.50 per month, cancellable monthly, remembers your clients, numbers automatically, sends reminders and ticks off paid invoices through your bank. You then start with the invoice number you left off at without an account, so the sequence runs on. See an invoicing tool for fewer than 10 invoices a month for the break-even point.