If you sell online, electronic invoicing stops being an accountant's errand and becomes part of the site. What has to happen between someone paying and their receipt arriving, and the three ways to solve it.
While you sell in a shop, electronic invoicing is a matter for the accountant and the point-of-sale system. The moment you start charging over the internet, it becomes part of the site: someone pays at eleven at night, and their receipt has to come from somewhere.
One clarification before going on: this covers the technical side, how the pieces connect. Whatever tax obligations apply to you are defined by your accountant and by current regulation, and it is worth confirming them before making decisions.
What has to happen between payment and receipt
Put simply, the chain is always the same:
- The customer pays on your site and the gateway confirms the charge went through.
- The electronic receipt is generated with the details of the sale and the buyer.
- The receipt is submitted to the tax authority and awaits its response.
- Once accepted, it is emailed to the customer.
- The sale and its receipt are recorded in your accounting.
The design question is simple: which of those steps happen on their own and which are done by a person. That is where the three ways of solving it come from.
Option 1: by hand
A purchase notification arrives, someone opens the invoicing system, enters the details and issues the receipt.
It works perfectly with a few orders a week and has zero development cost. It stops working sooner than you would think: past a certain volume it becomes a daily job, and it is the point where typos and receipts nobody issued start appearing.
Option 2: integrated with your current system
This is the route we recommend in most cases. If you already use an electronic invoicing system — and if you invoice, you already do — it most likely offers an API or some connector for online stores. The store notifies it of each sale and the system does the rest.
The advantage is that you do not duplicate information: the accounting stays where your accountant already works, and the site only fires the event. Before choosing a store platform, ask your invoicing provider whether they have a connector for it. That one question, asked in time, saves rebuilding things.
Option 3: invoicing inside the site
The site issues receipts directly to the tax authority, with no system in between. It gives the most control and is the most expensive to build and maintain, because any change to the official schema is yours to follow.
It is justified when volume is high or when the operation has quirks no commercial system covers. For a small business starting out, it is almost never the right answer.
The details to ask for at checkout
There is a real design tension here: every extra field in the purchase form lowers conversion, but a receipt needs certain identifying details about the buyer.
The way to resolve it without losing sales is to ask first whether the purchase is personal or on behalf of a company, and request the extra details only in the second case. Most buyers never see additional fields, and whoever needs an invoice in their company's name fills them in without complaint.
Expensive mistakes we see often
- Leaving invoicing until the end of the project. It shapes the checkout and the platform: it gets decided at the start.
- Choosing the store without checking it gets along with the invoicing system you already use.
- Not storing the receipt against the order. When a customer asks for it again six months later, you have to find it in two clicks.
- Not testing the full flow with a real purchase before opening. It is the only way to know it works.
How we approach it
We ask first which invoicing system the client uses and we talk to their accountant before writing a line of code. Half of all integration problems are avoided by having that conversation at the start of the project instead of at the end.
If you are putting your store together and are not sure how to approach this part, write to us and we will look at it with your case on the table.
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