Trade invoice: the weekly run, in order

Thursday evening, the week's work is done, and the invoicing is not. The expensive part is never the typing. It is the three decisions you make before you type, taken in the wrong order or not taken at all.

Here is the order that works, and what it costs when a step is skipped.

Collect the week before you open a document

Three piles, one per job: hours, delivery notes and supplier invoices, and signed day-work sheets. The day-work sheet is the one that decays. A sheet signed on site is a priced instruction; the same sheet produced on Thursday is an opening position in a negotiation.

Do the same with measurements: a quantity written down at the wall — metres run, square metres, units fixed — survives a query six months later. One reconstructed from memory does not.

Decide the VAT once per customer, not once per invoice

Whether construction work for a business customer carries VAT at all is a fact about the customer, not about the job: are they VAT registered, are they inside the CIS reporting chain, and have they told you in writing that they are an end user? Settle that when you take the customer on, record it against them, and stop re-deciding it at eight o'clock at night. The four questions are set out in when your invoice must not show VAT.

Split labour from materials on every line

Section 61(1) of the Finance Act 2004 keeps only "the direct cost to the sub-contractor of materials" out of the CIS deduction. The exclusion is not automatic — it works where the split is visible.

One line reading "supply and fit, 3,600 pounds" invites a deduction of 720 pounds. The same job written as 1,400 pounds of materials and 2,200 pounds of labour is deducted at 440. That is 280 pounds of your money sitting with HMRC until your tax return, on one invoice, because of a line break. The rest of the mechanics are in 20 per cent, 30 per cent or nothing at all.

Use the 250-pound form only for what it is for

A call-out, a washer, a replacement valve: where the consideration does not exceed 250 pounds, a simplified invoice under regulation 16A needs no customer name and no unit price. Anything carrying a warranty, a retention or a certificate gets the full fourteen particulars of regulation 14(1) — including the unit price, the item most often missing from a lump-sum trade invoice, and the VAT total in sterling even where the rest is in euro.

Send within 30 days, then chase on a clock

Regulation 13(5) gives 30 days from the tax point, not from the evening you felt ready. Once it is out, the money has a statutory floor: the Late Payment of Commercial Debts (Interest) Act 1998 implies interest at eight per cent over base for a business customer, plus a fixed 40, 70 or 100 pounds per invoice depending on the size of the debt. You need no clause in your terms for either.

Put the run in the same slot every week. An invoice raised every Thursday and one raised when you get round to it are the same document, three weeks apart in the bank.

The job this run does not fit

A single construction job with stages, variations and a retention will be mangled by a weekly run. The applications, the notices and the final account belong on their own timetable — that one is in invoicing a construction job stage by stage.

Where the week's hours, certificates and measurements sit before any of this starts: Zirko for electricians.

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What Zirko does here: hours taken into a document carry an origin marker and drop out of the selection, so the same hour cannot reach two invoices; the invoice number is issued by the server in an unbroken series; and a finished invoice can no longer be edited — the correction is a credit note or a cancellation with its own number.