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Felt that your invoices were lacking important information? You can now add additional details like your address and VAT number to both the invoices we send to you and the invoices sent to your clients.

It’s easy to customize the invoices we send to you, simply head into your Account Settings and add any additional details you require in the new Address field:

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You can also customize the invoices that are sent to your clients. In a similar fashion, click on Client Settings and click ‘Edit Client Details’. You will also see a new Address field:

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The updated invoices to your clients will feature all the details in the Address field, including any tax information you enter:

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This new feature shouldn’t just keep the tax-man happy, but also means more professional invoices for you and your clients. As always, do feel free to drop us a line if you have any suggestions as to how we can further improve our billing and invoicing facilities.

  • MH

    Keep the new features coming.

    Any idea when the APIs will updated to match the new options for both the address fields here and the payment breaks on the pre purchase credits?

  • GD

    yeah the bulk credit buys need to be part of the api… great job with everything. Campaign Monitor is our favorite web app.

  • James

    We need the breakdown of VAT on the invoice, however for it to be a proper VAT invoice I’m afraid.

  • Thom

    This still doesn’t help us! A VAT number is useless without a clearly declared VAT amount, clients can’t claim VAT back if it doesn’t say how much the VAT is. You need to allow people to set a VAT percentage that gets added on to our mark-up so we can pay the collected tax.

    Most of your UK and EU users are currently breaking the law because of this, please get some advice from a UK accountant and sort it out.

    Thanks.

  • Karl

    Unfortunately Thom hits the nail on the head with this, really need this feature before I can run with this with larger clients.

  • Kris

    Great feature, you just saved both sides a lot of work :-)

    Regarding the VAT issue mentioned by Thom:
    Compliant to European guidelines no VAT should be calculated/charged on the invoice when it is created by a company outside the EU. The invoice should just mention the total amount excluding taxes.
    It is up to the European client to calculate VAT themselves and pay the VAT amount to their local tax office. Best is to talk with your tax consultant for more info.

    regards,
    Kris

  • smallfurrything

    We’re a VAT registered UK agency and this has bothered us for a while so we took some advice from Her Majesty’s Revenue & Customs. Helpfully they referred us to guidance Notice 741 (Place of Supply of Services), which be found here: http://customs.hmrc.gov.uk/channelsPortalWebApp/downloadFile?contentID=HMCE_CL_000346 -if you didn’t knwo already.

    The long and short is: If you’re in the UK, don’t allow CM to invoice clients directly. If you do then:

    1. In order to process the commission you need to create an invoice for CM, for the commission amount, which must include VAT, thereby reducing your earnings.
    The only way CM can help us get around this is by sending the commissions to us as account credits not profit transfer notices. Although even then it’s a bit tenuous.

    2. As for the invoice from CM to the customer itself, well there’s nothing one can do about that, short of CM. What we did is tell our clients we used an Australian partner (http://CreateSend.com) with a superb CDN (Content Delivery Network) to distribute the campaigns for us, and the invoice was therefore from them. Not smooth, but it works and also saves the client worrying about how to claim the VAT back too. Clients are savvy enough to figure this out anyway, particularly as the invoices look so different from our normal ones anyway….

    This’ll be teaching UK businesses to suck eggs, but I hope this might help clarify where we (UK agencies) are, in relation to VAT, for CM.

    Nice to see CM thinking about us poms though. Small steps people, small steps.

  • MH

    It might be better to allow us to set the invoice to simply be a receipt (simply remove the word invoice) or better give us the option to turn it off altogether.

    Then using either a feed or even better a new API we could simply access a billing list that we could handle ourselves. We could then easily retrieve all the transactions for a specified month and receive a list of campaigns sent each entry containing; clients name, date, campaign name, recipients and cost charged. This way, for those who need it we can manage our own invoices through our own systems using our own stationary etc etc.

    One more thing that would put the cherry on the cake – could we have the option to receive an email when a client sends a campaign. That would be perfect.

  • Ros Hodgekiss

    Hi folks, many thanks for all your feedback. In so much as we strove to update the invoices in a way beneficial to the majority of users out there, it seems that detailed VAT declaration for UK businesses thwarted us this time. All your comments have been extremely useful in helping us improve our invoices – many thanks to @smallfurrything, in particular.

    @GD – Could you kindly elaborate on your API request in an email to support@campaignmonitor.com? We’ll pick it up from there.

    @MH – Re: Updating the API to edit address fields, I’ll pass on your feedback – thanks! It is already possible to access an auto-updated billing RSS feed to view client transactions – in your account, click on ‘Billing’, then subscribe to the feed using the link at the bottom of the page.

    Please keep sending in your suggestions, each comment helps us make Campaign Monitor better for everyone.

  • Stef

    Thanks for adding this. Now we, as a EU company, can get a correct invoice from CM, showing our name, address and VAT number.

    @Kris: You’re correct about the EU guidelines. But I think what Thom meant is: they want the invoice for their customers – that is in fact created by CM – to be as if it were to be sent by themselves. In that case, they have to be able to add tax to the amount, since it is as if they are invoicing their clients as a UK company (and not as CM, a company outside the EU).

    For us this is not a problem: we’ll pay for our clients and invoice the clients ourselves (with our stationary and no english invoices, that would be strange for our customers). But now the invoices we’ll receive ourselves from CM will be correct (with VAT number and without tax applied).

  • Joseph Gourvenec

    I have read all the points relating to the VAT and YES it is a MAJOR inconvenience to many professional UK businesses that want to offer a professional service.

    The best suggestion to resolve this issue is to look at Google Checkouts VAT service as it is very simple.

    CM, Just simply create a TAX setup area for each users account thus allowing them to enter their own TAX rate, VAT number, Country of VAT.

    These are the basic options and allows for the user to update TAX rates as and when they might occur in their respective countries.

    Surely it cannot be that hard to add this little feature to include a percentage increase on the final amount due?

    Kind Regards,
    Joseph
    http://www.GBNetworks.co.uk

  • Mathew Patterson

    @Joseph

    Thanks for the additional information. There is possible issues though – we are an Australian company, and VAT is not required to be paid to us (but GST, the Australian equivalent, is collected from our Australian customers).

    We’ve had customers investigate this and there is differing professional opinions about how it should work, so it is more complex than it might appear.

  • Dave

    Just a query when you google createsend, which some clients may do – there is a company listed who seems to be passing off as createsend.com called create and go, please check out this link http://create-send.com/

  • Ros Hodgekiss

    @Dave Cheers for this tip, we’re getting in touch with this reseller.

  • Fritz

    Hey Ros, please refere to your credit card contract. As Visa and Mastercard restrictions will tell you not to charge any company on behalfe of anyone else. I am not sure if you comply with the contract as you are doing it right now. The reason is to prevent money laundering and keeping up transparency for the consumer. As you retrieve money over a credit card and then spread it out all over the world via paypal – you are getting very close to money laundering – at least here in germany you would be in trouble.

    As an EU company in germany, It would be great to just be able to enter the prices for my clients but CM is not charging them. It acts only as a usefull information for our clients what amount they will be charged. In copy send that info to me the administrator, so i can create an invoice on my own.
    That would be the easiest way on my perspektive. So that way you don’t have to deal with forgeign VATs or Invoice languages or even conflicts with your credit card acquirer.

    If you do so, think about adding a template for a confirmation email with the final amount with the amount and contact name as spaceholder. So that way we would be able to set up that mail in our own language.

    Good job guys! U Rock!

  • Ros Hodgekiss

    Hi Fritz, apologies for the late response. Many thanks for this information – we’ll be looking closely at how we can improve our invoices for EU customers in the coming months. We appreciate the heads up!

  • Nick

    It would be super nice if you can check also how an agency send invoice by itself and you can send the invoice to to the agency even if their clients pays by themselves.

    let me give an example:
    You charge my client through their card with the amount of 123 for an agency upscale package of 60. I get the profit of 63 (-1 paypal expenses) from paypal but..
    I (as an agency) need to give them corporate invoice to my client (23% VAT)
    also goverment will tax me for my profit which for them is 100 as i dont show any invoice from you. Normally it has to be 40 but i dont have any invoice from you (they pay, remember? you give them some type of receipt)

    so from 123 – 23%(vat) – 26%(tax) – 61(your payment + paypal) my real profit is only 18!!

    please find a a solution about that.. it is a major for EU companies

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