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Invoicing

Invoice date​

Generally speaking, the invoice date you send to a customer should always be the last day of the month that you did the work in. This is also true even if you are a day or two late in sending the invoice.

Example: You work at a client from 1st January - 31st January 2019. The invoice date should be 31.01.2019. Even if you don’t create and send the invoice until the 2nd February, the invoice should be backdated as 31.01.2019. You can backdate an invoice up to 15 days.

Pre-registration in merverdiavgiftsregisteret​

You can pre-register in mva-registeret. What you need is a contract that indicates you are going to bill over 50.000 on your next invoice. Pre-registration is done here.

It takes about two weeks (maybe more) to get an answer from Skatteetaten. And you will be pre-registered from the month that your invoicing starts. So its possible to do this quite early, and just give an approximate date that you think you will have invoiced enough. (About two weeks in from your first day invoicing).

The first invoice & MVA​

Normally, MVA should be added on to your hourly rate when you bill the customer. So if you have agreed on a rate of 1.000 Kr per hour with a customer, the amount you charge them, plus MVA, will be 1.250 Kr per hour (1.000 Kr + 25%). Don’t spend that extra money, it isn’t yours: the kemnerkontoret will require that money back once every two months.

If you have a newly established AS, then you most likely will not have registered in the Merverdiavgiftsregisteret. You don’t need to register in Merverdiavgiftsregisteret, or charge MVA, if your company has a yearly income of less than 50.000 Kr - but your company hopefully will have a much higher income than that.

You must register for Merverdiavgiftsregisteret immediately after you send an invoice to a customer (without MVA) that takes your company’s income past the 50.000 Kr mark - most likely this will be your first invoice.

Let’s assume you work 150 hours at 1.000 Kr per hour in January 2019. The process is as follows:

  • You send an invoice dated 31.01.2019 to your customer with a total of 150 x 1.000 Kr = 150.000 Kr. No MVA should be included.

  • You then immediately register your company in the Merverdiavgiftsregisteret.

  • When you get confirmation that your company is registered (it can take a week or two), you should send a second invoice to the customer, charging only the MVA for the first invoice. This invoice should have two “product lines”, where the first one cancels out the invoice you already sent, and the second line invoices those hours again + MVA. The result of those two lines should be just the MVA:

    • 1.000 Kr x -150 = -150.000 Kr (note: minus 150 hours, with a minus total). This should be marked “January invoice, without MVA”.
    • 1.000 Kr x 150 x 25% MVA = 187.500 Kr. This should be marked “January invoice, with MVA”.
    • The total value of this invoice will be -150.000 + 187.500 = 37.500 Kr - which is only the value of the MVA of the invoice.

  • All subsequent invoices, to all customers, should now be sent with MVA.