Requirements to Invoices

If you are making business in Estonia sure you are going to issue invoices to your customers. If your company meet VAT requirements you have to apply for VAT taxable person number.

A taxable person shall issue an invoice for the transfer of goods or provision of services within seven calendar days as of the date on which the goods are dispatched or made available to the purchaser or the services are provided or as of the last day of the taxable period.

In Estonia there are two laws, determining invoice’s obligatory requisites: Accounting Act and Value-Added Tax Act.

If your company is a subject for VAT in Estonia, the following shall be set out in an invoice:

1. the serial number and date of issue of the invoice. You can work out your own system of numbers (for example Invoice No. 2014/0001), or just issue invoices chronologically (for example Invoice No.1);
2. the name and address of the taxable person and the person’s registration number as a taxable person;
3. the name and address of the acquirer of goods or the recipient of services. Notice! If bus ticket or store receipts does not contain acquirer`s name or address then acquirer can just add them by itself, as the point of particular requirement is, that only one company can reflect one and the same source document in its accounting;
4. the registration number of the acquirer of goods or the recipient of services as a taxable person, if the acquirer of goods or the recipient of services has tax liabilities upon the acquisition of goods or receipt of services;
5. the name or a description of the goods or services;
6. the quantity of the goods or extent of the services;
7. the date of dispatch of the goods or provision of the services or the date of receipt of full or partial payment for the goods or services, if the date can be determined and differs from the date of issue of the invoice;
8. the price of the goods or services exclusive of value added tax and any discounts, if these are not included in the price;
9. the taxable amount broken down by different rates of value added tax together with the applicable rates of value added tax or the amount of supply exempt from tax;
10. the amount of value added tax payable, except in the cases provided by law. The amount of value added tax shall be indicated in euros.

If your company is not a subject for VAT you should skip all items,cited above, connected with VAT.

Notice! If your company is not a subject for VAT, but you add unintentionally VAT tax to your invoice, you need to fulfill a single VAT declaration and pay VAT tax to Tax Board. Notice! The fact, that you are paying VAT, does not give to purchaser the right to deduct it from their calculated value added tax base. The purchaser has obligatory to show duty of care and check, if counterpart has really the right to add VAT tax or not, before deducting it.

Accounting Act of Estonia determines the concept of accounting source document, which certifies a business transaction. Most requirements are similar to Value-Added Tax requirements. Additionally there is only one extra requirement, which shall be set out in an invoice, when recognized document as accounting source document. It’s a signature of representative of company, certifying that the business transaction took place. When recording the business transaction in the accounts also number of the corresponding accounting entry is linked with source document. Also agreement is suitable to be recognized as accounting source document.