Automated (VAT) Invoices

ChannelEngine has the option to automatically send customers an invoice when their order is retrieved by us from the marketplace. As most marketplaces don’t calculate VAT themselves because of country differences, you have to create VAT invoices for businesses who need such an invoice (in order to reverse charge the VAT or for other tax purposes).

In order to make this possible, some settings need to be configured in ChannelEngine.

Please note: states in their invoice definitions that the delivery date should also be included on an invoice. However, this is impossible to include because not every carrier and/or method has delivery confirmation or automatically returns this information to us. Any date we would include would therefore be purely speculative.

Invoice settings

First go to Settings > Invoice settings.

Here you have to enter your company name + logo (that is if you want that added to the invoice), your address, your Chamber of Commerce number + VAT number and your customer service email address and phone number.

Optionally you can add a header or footer to the invoice if you want to further personalize this.

Email settings

Now go to Settings > Settings. Scroll down to the Outgoing Mail Settings (SMTP) section and enter your credentials.

Why do we need your mail server credentials you might ask? Because otherwise we can’t send emails on behalf of your company/mail address.

Due to common restrictions nowadays, such as SPF records, DKIM keys and DMARC, we can’t send emails from @yourdomain unless we use your own mail server and IP address directly to send these emails. As it would be silly to send such an email as ChannelEngine (because your customer most likely has no idea who we are), you’ll have to fill in these details.

VAT settings

If you want to include VAT on an invoice you also need to enable VAT calculations in ChannelEngine. To do so, go to Settings > VAT Rate Settings.

You’ll see a list of countries with their default VAT rates. Go to the countries for which you have a VAT-number and click on ‘Edit’ on the right.

Enter your VAT number and press ‘Save’. Please note that only new invoices/orders will now have VAT calculated; it’s not possible to have this imposed retrospectively on past orders.

Channel settings

Finally, after setting all these things up, you can now enable automatic invoices per channel.

To enable this, go to the ‘Setup’ tab in the channel settings of the channel you wish to enable automatic VAT invoices for. Scroll down to the option “Invoice Settings” and mark the checkbox for ‘send emails’.

Now every time an order for this channel comes in, the customer will automatically receive a VAT invoice in his mailbox.