How Spoonbill makes, sends and keeps your invoices. Attach this page to your own records, or print it; who in your business issues invoices and how you check them stays yours to describe.
01Numbering
Given at send, never before. A draft has no number. An invoice takes its number the moment it is sent.
Gap-free and never reused. Numbers run in sequence per document kind and per year, and are allocated under a database lock, so two sends at once never take the same one. A voided invoice keeps its number.
- Invoices and quotes each have their own series.
- A recurring invoice is one numbered invoice per period.
02After an invoice is sent
It cannot be changed. The seller, the client, the lines and the totals are frozen at send, and the PDF is written once.
What happens next is added, not overwritten. Payments, refunds and voids are recorded with their date on the invoice's history.
03Formats and versions
- Every invoice: a PDF.
- Where an e-invoice is expected: a PDF/A-3b carrying one factur-x.xml in the EN 16931 profile.
- For a public-sector client whose portal takes its own format: an XRechnung 3.0 or a Peppol BIS 3.0 file.
Each e-invoice is checked against the official rules before it leaves; one that fails is not sent as an e-invoice. The file that is sent is stored once — the client's link, the email attachment and your download are the same file.
When a format or its rules change, the change and its date are in the changelog.
04Where invoices are kept, and for how long
Where. In the country the privacy policy names for our servers, database and file storage.
For how long. Spoonbill deletes nothing by age. How long you must keep invoices is set by the law where you do business, so you can download everything at any time, on every plan: every invoice's PDF and e-invoice, an index, and the tables a tax auditor reads, in one ZIP from Settings → Privacy.
If you close your account. Everything is deleted 30 days after you ask. Download the ZIP first.
05What changed
Every change to Spoonbill is dated in the public changelog — the record of which version made an invoice on a given day.
Questions?
Write to us — a person reads and answers every message.