Het schrijven van een factuur

  • Zelfstandige
  • donderdag, 10 augustus 2006 15:21
  • Laatst aangepast op vrijdag, 31 oktober 2008 12:34

Wat moet er minimaal op een factuur staan?

Wat moet erop?

Mijn voormalig mentor Chris Brown schreef me ooit het volgende over het opstellen van een factuur (=invoice). Het is in het Engels (maar het geldt binnen Nederland). Als ik ooit tijd heb, zal ik het vertalen naar het Nederlands:

"Hi Kor, congratulations on your KvKedness. I thought that I would just give you a few pointers on issuing an invoice.

A legal invoice should contain the following items. The mandatory ones are marked with (*).

  • Your company name/logo (*)
  • Your company address (*)
  • "Factuur" or "Invoice" (*), it must be clear what the document is
  • Customer name (*)
  • Customer address
  • Invoice date (*)
  • Invoice number (*), this must be the next number out of a sequence (see below)
  • Customer's reference number, order number, etc

As many times as required:

  • Description of item, work, etc. (*)
  • Price per unit, if applicable
  • Number of units, if applicable
  • Price of item line (i.e. item price or unit price * quantity)

Summarize the above

  • Subtotal (*), i.e. the total excluding tax
  • "BTW" (*), identify the tax applied
  • BTW percentage applied (*) (see below)
  • BTW amount (*)
  • Total amount (i.e. subtotal + btw) (*)

It is useful to also put the following info (at the bottom of the page?):

  • Payment terms (e.g. betaling binnen 30 dagen)
  • Tel/Fax number
  • KvK number
  • BTW number, not mandatory but fairly essential
  • Bank account number, if you would like to be paid
  • IBAN/Swift code, so that international customers can pay you (see your statements or bank website)
  • Your email address and website

It is a legal requirement to use a sequential numbering system for your invoices and there cannot be any gaps in the numbering. Like many small traders, I don't issue a lot of invoices and so you end up with invoice number like 00001, 00002, etc. Not very proffesional looking.

I use a year prefix; e.g. 2004011. The sequence keeps going from year to year; i.e. it doesn't reset to 1 at the beginning of each year. This allows me to issue 999 invoices before I have to think of a new scheme (which would be to change the sequence number bit to 4 digits :-)).

If you ever need to apply more than one type of tax (unlikely), you will have to show the rate applied next to each item and the total amount of each tax.

Hope that is some help
Chris"