A customer has pointed out that I have been issuing invoices without my VAT number. So obviously I have enabled its inclusion and am now re-issuing all the affected invoices. But I am wondering how this came to be. When I started I would have entered my VAT number - I think I think I already had my VAT number at that stage so would have entered it in. I wouldn’t have deliberately disabled it. Similarly for company number, which is again a legal requirement (AIUI).
Perhaps these things should be on by default? Or perhaps they are already and it’s all my fault…
Thanks! If I may make a further suggestion - company registration number (if applicable) also be automatically enabled. In short, that VAT-registered Limited companies have legally-compliant invoices “out of the box”.
My personal preference is that this additional legally-required information goes into the footer so that’s how I have configured it. In the context of an invoice it is “noise” rather than “signal”.
While I’m here - and I know this has been discussed before - the one feature I would like to see would be the option of having individually numbered sequences for different customers. Currently I am entering “Fred001”, “Fred002”, “John001”, etc., by hand each time. (I’ve checked, this is a compliant numbering scheme as long as each customer’s sequence is consecutive). Some of us (and I’m not alone, I’ve taken a straw poll on a mailing list) don’t particularly want our customers to know how many invoices we are generating. It could be too many (“this person is obviously too busy to take care of us properly”) or too few (“can’t be any good if they’ve only sent out one other invoice in the last month”). You refer in a previous discussion (August 2013) to providing “a clear audit trail”. As I am not an accountant, I am not sure what that means precisely. But as a “micro-business”, it’s really not hard to reconcile my invoices with my accounts.
And, err, I am seriously impressed with the level of support that you provide! I particularly appreciate that you provide clear and direct answers. I have recently been wading through support forum posts on another web-based system where it seemed that the ‘offical rep’ would rather pretend that they had not understood the question than bring themselves to admit that no, it can’t be done.
The VAT label is now added by default on all new accounts created that are identified as VAT registered.
I agree that it would be helpful if the company number is also be setup in the same way. We have an item label for company number (as with the VAT Registration number), it may need to go here rather than in the footer, but we’ll take a look and make a decision.
