Self-Billing Credits

DE Gutschriftverfahren
FR autofacturation

Self billing is an invoicing procedure where a credit note from the customer replaces the invoice from the supplier.

In Germany, this is called credit under tax law ("steuerrechtliche Gutschrift") according to German VAT Act (UStG), Art. 14 (2).

Understanding Self-Billing Credits

Usually, larger companies have the means to issue correct invoices, whereas smaller businesses may lack these capacities. In order to reduce the risk of errors or disputes when contracting a small supplier, the company can create a credit – payable to the supplier – using their invoicing resources and based on their data.

Another common use case for issuing credits in favor of a supplier is the marketplace scenario: A company sells products that are delivered by a participating organization. The company receives the buyer's money, but they have to pay out the fulfiller – issuing a credit.

Self-Billing Credits in JustOn

In JustOn Billing & Invoice Management, credits are invoices with a negative amount.

Enabling Self-Billing Credits Enabling Creditor Bookings

Implementation Details

Basically, the creation of a self-billing credit is controlled by two settings:

Invoice field Class is set to Credit

This is set automatically if the grand total of an invoice (produced in the field Grand Total) yields a negative amount.
Invoice field Type is set to Purchased Service

This can be set on invoice generation using the ON field ON_Type on the invoice source object, which defines the type of the produced invoice.

If Type is set to Purchased Service but Class is set to Invoice (resulting from a positive grand total), JustOn Billing & Invoice Management will ignore the type and not generate a credit.

Bookkeeping Data

Self-billing credits represent payables to a creditor – the same way as incoming invoices or expenses do. This is why the produced booking data usually relates to following booking accounts:

Expenses

Depending on your accounting system, you book expenses to accounts like, for example, raw materials, supplies, incoming goods, purchased services.

To provide for the correct booking account allocation, you create dedicated G/L Account Assignment Rules. The criteria for determining the produced G/L account must include Invoice Class (= Credit), Invoice Type (= Purchased Service) and Tax Rule.

The following example rule will produce the G/L account number 5906 ("Purchased services 19% input tax" in German SKR 04):

Field	Value
Name	Purchased Service 19%
Invoice Class	Credit
Invoice Type	Purchased Service
Tax Rule	DE_19
G/L Account	5906

Input tax

Taxes to pay when purchasing goods or services can be deducted from the taxes to pay for revenues. This is why most accounting systems book these taxes to dedicated input tax or pre-tax accounts, separated by tax rate.

To provide for the correct booking account allocation, you create dedicated Collective Account settings of the type Pre-Tax.

The following example setting will produce the booking account number 1406 ("Deductible input tax 19%" in German SKR 04):

Field	Value
Name	Pre Tax 19%
Type	Pre-Tax
Tax Rule	DE_19
Booking Account	1406
Business Partner Account	creditor number

Creditor

For expense-related bookings, the relevant business partner is your creditor. The way to set the creditor account number depends on your business use cases:

For supplier-specific creditor numbers, you use the optional Account field ON_CreditorNo.
To support collective creditors (or creditor groups), you use the optional Invoice field CreditorNo (which takes precedence over the Account field ON_CreditorNo).

Booking Detail Types

If the invoice class is Credit and the invoice type is Purchased Service, JustOn Billing & Invoice Management creates booking details for creditor bookings of the following types:

Type	Description
Expense	Represents the (net) amount of the purchased goods or services
Pre-Tax	Represents the input tax to pay when purchasing goods or services (which can be deducted from the taxes to pay for revenues)
Deferred Expense	Represents deferred expenses – money paid in advance for goods or services to be received in a future booking period.

Deferred Expenses

JustOn Billing & Invoice Management can create booking details for deferred expenses, distributing the prepaid amount to one or multiple future booking periods.

For the software to generate booking details for deferred expenses, you must create a corresponding Collective Accounts custom setting of the type Deferred Expense, and where the field Account specifies the dedicated deferred expense account number (like for the German SKR 04, for example, 1900 "Aktive Rechnungsabgrenzung"). It writes deferred revenue bookings according to the revenue recognition rule set in the invoice line item field Recognition Rule. The available options include:

Calendar Year: Allocates expense bookings to the calendar year of the service date or service period of the invoice line item (with the invoice service period as fallback).
Booking Month: Creates multiple expense booking details that are evenly distributed to booking periods (calendar months) over the service period of the invoice line item (with the invoice service period as fallback).

Data Transfer to Accounting Systems

To seamlessly transfer credit-based bookkeeping data to DATEV, JustOn Billing & Invoice Management integrates with JustOn Connector for DATEV. This is an add-on to JustOn Billing & Invoice Management that generates DATEV-specific ledger records from expenses, and transfers them to DATEV Unternehmen online. Once there, these accounting documents and accounting document items can be used by any DATEV application that accesses the DATEV Cloud.

For each self-billing credit, an accounting document record of the type Accounts Payable Ledger is created. Each booking detail is exported to an accounting document item (1:1 relationship). The two objects are linked with each other. Invoice PDF and e-invoice XML attachments (that is, files with the content version types Invoice PDF and E-Invoice) are copied and attached to the accounting document. The maximum size per file is 3,76 MB.

On successful transfer, the Locked checkbox of the accounting document is selected, and the booking detail is marked as exported. In case of errors, neither an accounting document nor an accounting detail is created for the affected booking details, and an error message is written to the booking detail.

For details, see Data Transfer to DATEV.