The deadlines for issuing invoices to customers
We must "upload" the invoices for the current month within 4 days (8 temporarily) from the date of issue, and at the latest by the 16th of the following month ( VAT is generally settled on the 20th, and for companies included in the SII on the 30th), and the date that the invoice must contain must be the date of its Issue.
The first threat to our cash flow is that our customers use the shipping month, rather than the delivery month, to calculate their payment due date. It seems likely that we'll add 30 days to our average collection period. Why is that?
Imagine we're a company with limited resources, and those we do have prioritize sales over administrative processes (quite common). We close our delivery notes for June on the 30th, or the 1st, 2nd, or even the 5th of July, if we're behind schedule, and prepare the invoices as soon as we have a moment. That's when we realize we're missing the customer's information, we haven't negotiated the payment terms, we don't know their address, etc., and all of this leads us to issue the invoices on the 12th.
Until now we invoiced and sent the invoice to the client on July 12th, but in the document we included June 30th as the invoice date, but if we do that we miss the deadline to upload the invoice to the SII, which for an invoice date of June 30th would be July 4th.
And if we comply with the law, our invoice will be dated July 12th, or at most July 8th, and our client could count their payment date from that month and not from the previous one.
So, either we manage to invoice earlier, or the customer might misunderstand the invoice date. Adding 30 days to the collection period can have a significant impact on cash flow, which is easy to calculate.
The solution involves reviewing customer contracts, including the contractual date on the invoice for calculating the payment date, or speeding up the billing process by allocating more time during the month to record the necessary customer information and the transactions to be billed.
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A graduate in Economics from the University of Barcelona, he is also a Certified Actuary, Real Estate Agent, and Insurance Broker.
He furthered his training with courses in taxation, business valuation, and credit management offered by the College of Economists of Catalonia and the Center for Financial Studies (CEF).
In 2000, he became the managing partner of the firm, and since 2011, he has also been responsible for the Finance Department.
For five years, while already a member of the management team at Àmbit Assessor, he also held the positions of Deputy General Manager and Finance Director at Alco Grupo Empresarial.
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