How do I write an invoice as a craftsman?

Once you have successfully completed your project, you naturally want to invoice your customer for your work. To ensure that neither your customer nor the tax office can complain, you must include certain required information on your invoice.

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You can already include a large part of the mandatory information in the letterhead.

Mandatory information in the invoice:

• Name and address of your customer
• Name and address of your company 
• Creation date of the invoice 
• Consecutive invoice number (observe GoBD conformity!)
• Your tax number or VAT ID
• Information about the product and/or service (quantity, type, scope, time)
• Invoice amount (net amount, tax rate, tax amount and gross amount)

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Voluntary but useful additional information:

In addition to the mandatory information required by the tax office and your customers, it makes sense to fill out your invoice with additional voluntary information. This way you can make sure that you receive your money as quickly as possible and your customers know exactly how to pay.

• Your contact details such as telephone number and e-mail address
• Your bank details
• A payment period 
• A partial invoice
• Your company logo
• A short letter to your customer

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Example - Clear material invoice incl. 19% VAT

You can include general information such as your bank details in the footer.

The small business regulation is intended to make accounting easier for you as a small or newly founded company by not charging VAT and passing it on to the tax office later.

In practical terms, this means that you do not show VAT on your invoices and include a note to this effect. For example: "According to § 19 UStG in accordance with the small business regulation, no VAT is charged." If you use tradesman software such as plancraft, this is usually taken into account automatically.

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How you send your invoices depends entirely on you and your customers. It doesn't matter to the tax office whether you send them as a traditional letter or by email. However, you should always keep in mind what is more efficient and cheaper for you. Printing out your invoices and sending them by post may not cost you much time and money at the beginning, but these amounts will add up over the course of your self-employment and can be easily avoided if you do everything digitally.

As a company, you are obliged to keep your business documents for a period of 10 years. It doesn't matter whether the documents are stored in paper form or digitally.

In addition to the duration of storage, the GoBD is also important for you. This guideline describes the type and sorting of your documents.

The background to this is that tax offices do not have to rummage through piles of unsorted and incomplete documents, which is why you are obliged to store and label your invoices in a traceable, sorted, truthful, complete and consecutive manner.

And what does that mean for you in plain language?

Your invoices must be stored dry, clean and sorted. If your invoices are only stored locally on your computer, a hardware defect can have fatal consequences. We therefore recommend backing up your files in the cloud.

With a craftsman software like plancraft, you can write invoices in no time at all, without fear of forgetting anything or failing to meet legal requirements. All mandatory information is automatically taken into account, and you write your craftsman's invoices without errors. In addition, with the functions that exist today, Plancraft meets the GoBD standards.

And the best part: Our software is cloud-based. This allows you to process your invoices from any device anywhere you have an internet connection and keep your documents safe.

There are a few things you need to consider when creating and archiving your invoices, especially if you've just founded your own craft business or are taking over an existing business. In addition to meeting the requirements of the tax office, you want to make billing as easy as possible for your customers, and all of this should cost as little time and money as possible.

As a first solution, invoice templates in Excel and Word can look attractive, but they do not solve the requirements of the tax office and do not protect you from errors. Special software can help you by doing everything for you, calculating the sales tax, sending out your invoices and storing everything for you.

In this way, the tax office and annoying office work cannot stand in the way of your success. It doesn't have to be expensive or complicated to help you focus on what you do best.

We recommend using a Craftsman software. Good software makes it easier to write the invoice & automatically complies with legal requirements. This is how you easily create your invoices.