All companies need invoices. Firstly, you won’t be able to receive money for products or services without it. But most importantly, an invoice is a key document for your accounting.
Accurate invoice management provides a company with a full picture of sales, taxes, relations with customers. As a result, proper invoice management can help you make decisions based on these insights briefly and in time. It can also protect your company in the case of an unexpected audit or governmental inspection — just keep your invoices accurately stored, accounted for, and don't forget to pay attention to the wise words of your accountant.
An invoice is basically a written message that transforms the fact of sending or receiving money into Accounting books. It’s a primary document that describes the goods or services that the money was received or spent for.
Βy world standards invoices should contain:
- invoice number
- date of issue and date due to
- name and contact of counterparties
- a line detailing all products or services
- cost per unit, the total amount of money owed, applied taxes, and tax rates
- the place of service (i.e. a jurisdiction)
A type and a place of service, as well client data in some cases can affect the tax rates, thus it’s very important to complete these fields in the document.
The other fields help to record precisely your sales and income. Again, for taxes and accounting. However, the whole invoicing process is done not just for the sake of bookkeeping but also to structure the processes of your company correctly.
An invoice number, for example, is not a random sequential code. You should not put as simply number invoices '1', '2', '3', etc. as this can be confusing further as numbers reach double or triple figures. Rather, you’d better have an invoicing system. Normally, a number might refer to the year, the name of the agreement, and then a longer sequential number comes.