Pro forma invoice: harmless until somebody pays it

Fifteen days. That is how long an Irish business has to put a VAT invoice out after the end of the month in which it supplied the work — and a pro forma invoice does not start those fifteen days, does not create a VAT liability, and gives your customer no right to reclaim anything. Then somebody pays it, and all three of those statements stop being true on the same afternoon.

Both spellings, pro forma and proforma, describe the same document, and the confusion is not about the spelling. It is that a pro forma is usually described as an invoice that is not an invoice — which makes it sound inert. In Ireland it is inert only up to the moment money moves against it.

What a pro forma is not

Take the list of particulars a VAT invoice must carry and see what a pro forma has none of. Revenue requires "a unique sequential number", "the breakdown by the rate of VAT", "the total VAT payable in respect of the supply" and "the date on which the goods or services were supplied", among others. A pro forma has no sequential number because it must not consume one; no VAT breakdown because no supply has been made; and no date of supply for the same reason.

What a VAT invoice does, and a pro forma does not, is stated by Revenue in one line: a VAT invoice allows "your VAT registered customers to reclaim the VAT charged to them". A customer who tries to claim on a pro forma is claiming on a document that never established anything, and the entry will not survive a look.

That is also the practical argument for keeping pro formas out of your numbering series altogether. A series with gaps in it is a series that has to be explained; a series that includes documents which were never supplies is worse, because the explanation is longer.

Fifteen days, counted from the end of the month

"A VAT invoice must issue within 15 days of the end of the month in which goods or services are supplied." The period runs from the month end rather than from the job, so everything supplied in July shares one deadline of 15 August — whether it was finished on the second or the thirty-first.

A pro forma does not engage that rule, because no supply has taken place. It is a request, and a request has no statutory deadline attached to it.

The day it stops being harmless

Here is the mechanism, in Revenue's own words about payments received before the work is done.

"a supply is deemed to have taken place at the time of receiving the payment"

"Value-Added Tax (VAT) is chargeable on the pre-payment and you must pay the VAT to Revenue in your VAT return."

And the document obligation that follows it:

"You must issue a VAT invoice not later than the 15th day of the month following that during which each such payment was received."

So a pro forma sent on 12 August and paid on 27 August produces a deemed supply on 27 August and a VAT invoice due by 15 September. Nobody has to have done any work. The trap is not legal subtlety, it is memory: pro formas are usually sent by somebody who wants money before starting, and the follow-up invoice is the one document nobody has a reason to think about once the money has arrived.

The safe habit is to treat a paid pro forma as a trigger rather than a closed item — the moment it is marked paid, the real invoice is due for the month that payment fell in.

Where a pro forma genuinely earns its place on an Irish job

On most jobs a pro forma is a convenience. On a relevant contract in Ireland it is close to the only honest document available, and for a reason peculiar to this country.

Two figures you would normally put on an invoice do not exist yet. The VAT amount is not yours to state: where RCT operates on the payment the construction reverse charge applies, the subcontractor's charge does not include VAT, and the invoice carries the statement that the VAT is the principal's to account for. The net payment is not yours to state either: the principal notifies the payment to Revenue, Revenue issues a deduction authorisation at 0, 20 or 35 per cent, and only then is there a figure. What that finished invoice looks like once both are settled is in RCT invoice: the document that shows neither the VAT nor what you will be paid.

A pro forma is the document that asks for the stage payment without asserting either number. It is not, however, a payment claim notice: on a construction contract the document that starts a statutory response clock has its own requirements and its own deadlines, and a pro forma meets none of them — see The payment claim notice: five days that decide if you get paid. Use the pro forma to ask for money. Use a payment claim notice when you want the Act behind the request.

Private customers, and one line you must never write

Revenue's list of who must be given a VAT invoice reads: "another accountable person", "a Department of State", "a local authority", "a body established by statute", "a person who carries on an exempt activity", and certain persons in other Member States. A private individual is not on it.

So for a homeowner you are free in the form of the document — and that freedom is exactly why pro formas are common in domestic work, where a deposit is asked for before a kitchen is ordered. The freedom stops at one line. Section 115(2) of the Value-Added Tax Consolidation Act 2010: "A person who is not a registered person and who, on or after 1 November 1972, issues an invoice in which an amount of tax is stated shall be liable to a penalty of €4,000." Heading the page "pro forma" does not move it outside that. A business that is not registered states no tax on any document it sends, and whether it should be registered at all is settled by a figure smaller than most people think — see The VAT limit in Ireland is €42,500 — the €85,000 belongs to somebody else.

What to put on the document

A pro forma that works is one nobody can mistake for something else, and it takes six lines. This is a wording you can lift as it stands, with the names changed.

PRO FORMA — NOT A VAT INVOICE

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Brennan Heating & Plumbing Ltd · 14 Clanbrassil Street, Dublin D08 XY72 · VAT registration IE1234567FA

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Pro forma PF-2026-041 · Issued 12/08/2026 · Valid to 11/09/2026

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For: Sandford Road apartments, stage 2 — first fix plumbing. Proposed stage payment.

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Amount proposed: EUR 10,000.00

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This document is issued for payment purposes only. It is not a VAT invoice, it states no VAT and it confers no right to deduct. A VAT invoice will issue no later than the fifteenth day of the month following the month in which payment is received or the supply is completed, whichever is earlier.

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Where the supply is one on which the principal contractor accounts for VAT, that invoice will carry the statement "VAT on this supply to be accounted for by the principal contractor" and will show no VAT amount.

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Payment of this document is a payment on account and will be set against the final invoice for this stage.

Four details in that block are doing the work. The heading says what it is not, in the place a reader looks first. The reference PF-2026-041 is from a separate series, so no invoice number has been used up. The paragraph about the fifteenth day is a promise to your customer and a note to yourself, sitting on the document that will still be on the desk when the money lands. And the last line settles in advance the argument that otherwise arrives with the final invoice: this was a payment on account, and it comes off.

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Position as at 24 September 2026, checked against Revenue's published guidance on invoices, advance payments and deposits, and against section 115(2) of the Value-Added Tax Consolidation Act 2010 in its revised form. This describes the rules and is not tax advice. The fifteen-day rule and the deemed supply on payment are long-standing, but the treatment of forfeited deposits has already changed once by reference to a cut-off date — so where a deposit is retained rather than set against work, check revenue.ie's payments in advance and deposits page for the position at the time of the forfeiture rather than at the time of the deposit.

What Zirko does here: a draft carries no number at all — the document number is issued by the server only when the document is finished, so nothing you send out for discussion consumes a number from the invoice series, and the finished invoice is then frozen and cannot be edited. What Zirko does not do: it has no separate pro forma document type today, so a pro forma is something you produce alongside rather than inside the invoice series, and nothing in Zirko watches for the payment that turns it into a supply. That fifteen-day clock starts in your bank account, which is not a place the software can see.