Offers, invoices & the customer portal

Documents

Voltane knows four document types — offers (quotes), proformas, invoices and credit notes — and they share one flow: pick a customer, add lines (free text or from your product catalogue), issue, send.

Numbering, default payment terms, your bank details and your logo are all set once in your team settings. VAT is handled for you: rates per line, EU rules per country, and reverse-charge/OSS logic decided automatically based on where your customer is.

Handy details:

• Your invoices say where to pay. Fill in your IBAN (and BIC) in team settings and they appear with your company details, under your KvK and VAT number, on every document you send. Every unpaid invoice also gets a payment block: account holder, IBAN, BIC and the invoice number as the reference. Ask customers to quote that reference — it's what lets a bank transfer be matched to the right invoice instead of guessed at by amount. Credit notes and offers never get the payment block, since no money is owed to you there.

• Webshop orders keep their number. An invoice that came from a Shopify order shows the order number your customer sees on their confirmation email, so the two documents match.

• Every document is worded for what it is. An invoice has an invoice date, a due date and a payment deadline. An offer has an offer date and shows how long it stays valid. A credit note — where the money moves back to your customer — carries only its date and asks for nothing.

• A credit note uses negative amounts. It says so under Invoice type, and turns red as soon as a line is positive.

• EU goods and services have different VAT statements. Goods supplied to a business in another Member State can use 0% with a valid foreign VAT number, transport evidence and the required ICP listing. General B2B services usually say VAT reverse-charged. We check VAT numbers through VIES, retain the selected number and evidence on the issued invoice, and queue a recheck if VIES is unavailable. The 30-day refresh is our checking policy. An existing valid result can stand during an outage; the sidebar shows its date and outage.

• Services follow where your customer is established. For a general B2B service, Voltane takes that country from the customer's billing address. If the invoice asks for it, record the fixed establishment involved in this invoice. A Dutch VAT number alone does not decide the place of a general B2B service. Outside the EU, a tax number on the customer marks them as a business. For a consumer outside the EU, choose the service category on each line: general and supported intangible services have different rules. Unsupported categories and mixed goods/services abroad need separate tax review before issue. Shipping and gift cards do not make the invoice a mixed goods/services supply.

• Purchases also need the supplier's establishment. For a general B2B service you buy, record the supplier's country of establishment and any fixed establishment involved in that supply. Check which establishment actually supplied the service; the supplier's VAT number alone does not settle this.

• A line has the same three fields as a product: type, VAT treatment and VAT rate. Picking a product fills them in, and you can change them for one sale. Choose Margin scheme for used goods: VAT only on what you earned on it, and none shown on the invoice. Selling a used good to a business that wants to reclaim the VAT? Choose Standard. For a business elsewhere in the EU, or a customer outside the EU, the rate field shows Reverse charge or Zero-rated: your customer decides that, not the line.

• Shipping is taxed like the goods it ships. It takes their VAT rate, and over goods at different rates — say 21% and 9% — it's split over both in proportion to their amounts, one line per rate. On an invoice of only used goods it goes under the margin scheme too. You don't have to change anything: it follows as you add or remove goods. We assume all goods on the invoice go in that one shipment, and the line form says so when you choose Shipping charge.

• Deposits and gift cards aren't taxed. Set a line to Deposit or Gift card and it's 0% in whichever country the invoice is taxed in, says Not taxed on the invoice, and a credit note refunds it the same way.

• Used goods stay Dutch. Goods you sell under the margin scheme are taxed here, on your margin, wherever your customer lives. An invoice with only used goods to a consumer elsewhere in the EU is therefore a Dutch sale, whatever your OSS setting, and used goods never count toward the €10,000 distance-selling threshold. Sell used and new goods on one invoice and only the new goods count.

• An issued invoice keeps its VAT. Once you issue an invoice, its VAT stays as it was issued: recording a payment or changing a setting later doesn't rewrite it. A credit note uses the same VAT as the invoice it corrects.

• An offer charges what its invoice will charge. An offer's VAT is worked out exactly like the invoice it becomes: the same EU rules, the same €10,000 distance-selling threshold, the same OSS setting and registration date. The total your customer agrees to is the total they get billed. Offers themselves never count toward that threshold — only invoices and credit notes do, so a stack of open offers can't push you over it.

• Stock you don't have stops an invoice, not an offer. While a document is still a draft, any line short of stock says so in amber, and Issue document stays greyed out with the reason underneath it. Offers and proformas go through — you can quote what you'll order in. To invoice anyway, restock the variant or allow overselling on it. Only products that track stock and forbid overselling are checked, so most lines are never in the way.

  In advanced creation, stock warnings appear as soon as you choose a variant and quantity in the line dialog. They also appear with your lines and in the final review. Choose View stock to inspect the variant without leaving your invoice. If you can edit variants, you can adjust stock or allow overselling in that dialog. These changes apply to the product everywhere. Saving checks availability again and keeps your invoice line intact. The product link opens the full product page in a new tab; the refresh icon checks stock manually.

• A line becomes a product only when you say so. Typing a description gives you an invoice line and nothing else. Want it in your catalogue too? Tick Also add this as a new product on the line. That keeps one-offs — deposits, price corrections, "difference" lines — out of your product list.

• Proof that the goods left, kept with the invoice. Selling abroad, you need evidence the goods actually crossed the border — without it the tax office can treat the sale as a domestic one and the VAT becomes yours to pay. Invoices that need it say so, and Record shipment stores the carrier, the tracking number and what was in the box. Only goods are offered for the box — not services, and not the shipping you charged. Shopify orders fill this in themselves from their fulfilments. Your dashboard lists any invoice abroad still missing it, so it gets noticed on the day rather than at an audit.

  You can record a shipment on any invoice or credit note, draft or issued, not only the ones that need proof — a tracking number is worth having on a domestic parcel too. Click a shipment on the invoice and you get the whole story: what was in that parcel, the tracking link, and the carrier's own updates as they come in — picked up, in transit, out for delivery, delivered, or a delivery attempted while nobody was home. The form only ever offers what hasn't shipped yet, so a second parcel can't claim to have sent things twice.

  For Shopify orders you also get the shop's own history on the document's timeline: when it was placed, which payment came through, when the confirmation and shipping emails went out, when it was fulfilled. Both halves of the same order's story end up on one screen.

• Simple or guided — create a document with the quick form or a step-by-step wizard. Starting from a customer, the wizard skips asking who the customer is — it already knows. Click anywhere on a mode card to start. Choose Cancel in the quick form or the wizard's first step to return to mode selection. This discards your unsaved entries; the customer and document type you started with stay selected.

• Edit each line before creating the document. In the guided wizard, choose Add line and type a description or select a product. When a product has several variants, choose one and its name is added to the description. Use the pencil beside a line to change its wording, quantity, price or VAT. You can also remove lines or drag them into a different order. Cancelling the dialog keeps the line as it was. Review the customer, lines, totals and notes before creating the document.

• No customer yet? Create one without leaving the invoice. In the wizard's first step you either pick an existing customer or create one in two short steps: who they are, then the address the invoice goes to. The country is already set to your own, so for most customers you only fill in the street and town. The address can be skipped and added later. If a customer with the same email, company or VAT number already exists we say so straight away — and one tap picks them instead of creating a second record.

• Due dates follow the customer. If a customer has their own agreed payment term, that's what the due date uses; otherwise your team's default applies. Change the issue date and the due date moves with it.

• The delivery date comes from your shipments. Fill in when a parcel was delivered (or let Shopify's carrier updates do it), and the day the first one arrived becomes the invoice's Delivery date while it's still a draft. It's printed on the invoice when it differs from the invoice date, and fixed once you issue. VAT is due no later than the 15th of the month after delivery, so an invoice sent after that shows up for review in your VAT return. Changed a line after it shipped? The invoice warns you that the shipment no longer matches, before you issue it that way.

• Duplicate anything; credit an invoice by picking which lines to credit.

• A document has one language, fixed the moment you issue it. By default that's your own — everything you issue reads the same, which is what your records and your accountant want. Prefer to write to customers in their language? Turn that on in your invoice settings, and new documents follow the customer whenever we can render their language. Switch a draft to another customer and it takes that customer's language. Every email about a document — sending it, a reminder, a payment receipt — is written in the document's language, so the email and the attached PDF always match. Changing the setting or a customer's language later never rewrites a document you already sent.

• A reading copy, when the languages differ. If the document is in a language you don't read (or your customer doesn't), the arrow next to the Download button offers it in the other party's language. It's for reading only — what you send, what's in the portal and what's stored is always the document itself. When both of you share a language there's nothing to offer, so there's no arrow.

• Check a draft before you issue it. On a draft, Download draft gives you the PDF as it will look — titled "Invoice (draft)" where the number will go and marked "Draft" across every page, so nobody takes it for the real thing. It isn't kept as a version. The download shows what's saved, so save your changes first.

• The PDF says what it is. Its title reads Invoice, Offer, Proforma or Credit note, followed by the number, so an offer can never be mistaken for a bill. A credit note also names the invoice it corrects and that invoice's date.

• An issued document keeps its details. Your company details and your customer's — names, addresses, VAT numbers, KvK, bank account — are fixed the moment you issue. Change them later and new documents use the new details, while everything you've already sent keeps saying exactly what it said.

• Missing company details? Every invoice has to say who sent it. If your company name, address or VAT number is missing, the invoice screen tells you in red, with a link to where you fill it in. You can still issue — but fill them in first, or that invoice goes out without them.

• Every document keeps its PDF, its email history and a full activity timeline.

• Send it again whenever you need to. Any issued document — invoice, credit note, offer or proforma, answered or not — can be mailed again with Mail invoice. The preview tells you when it last went out, so you know whether your customer should already have it.

• See where a document stands at a glance. The Progress card on top of the document follows it from created to sent, opened, due and paid — for an offer: valid until, accepted, invoice. Once an invoice is past due or a reminder has gone out, it shows the reminders instead: which went out, and which can be sent next. Click one that can still go out and it opens, ready to send.

• The total and what's been paid, in one card. Payment information opens with the document's total — on a draft with the button to change its currency, on a foreign-currency document with the amount in that currency and the rate. Under it, a bar shows how much is paid (green) and still open (amber), with the percentage: nothing paid yet, partly paid, or paid in full. An offer or proforma shows its total in the same place.

• Times read as how long ago. Payments, emails and activity say "12 min", "3 h", "yesterday", "5 wk" or "3 mo"; only past a year do you see a date. Hover over one for the exact date.

The customer portal

Your customer doesn't need an account. Every email contains a personal "view online" link that opens their portal, where they can:

• see all their documents and download PDFs;
• approve an offer — with a terms checkbox, their name (required) and an optional drawn signature that ends up on the PDF;
• decline with a reason;
• ask a question, which lands on the document's timeline and notifies you. By default they can ask about offers and proformas; under Settings → Invoice settings you choose every document or none. The email only mentions questions where the portal accepts one;
• ask for a new offer when an offer has expired — one button on the expired offer, instead of being told to go and find your email address. It reaches you as a notification and sits on the document's timeline. Asking twice in a day confirms the request rather than sending a second one;
• pay online when you've connected Mollie.
• update their own details — profile, one or more addresses (default, billing, delivery), and their contact people.

Each document opens with its steps — read it, pay or accept, then keep a copy — and the one your customer is on is marked. Everything about paying is in one card: the amount, when it's due (or how late it is), what has been paid so far, the button to pay or accept, and your bank details. On a phone that card comes first.

You see everything they do: opened, downloaded, approved, declined, questions — on the document's timeline and as notifications to the team. Opens and downloads are counted, so the document tells you "downloaded 3×" and when the last one was. That is the answer to "did they actually get it?" without having to ask.

Opening a customer's portal yourself (from their profile, from the invoice editor, or from an email link) shows you exactly what they see, but you can't approve, decline, ask a question, or edit their details on their behalf — those stay theirs to do. It also records nothing: a document doesn't count as seen because you looked at it.

The portal carries your name, not ours. Its header shows your logo — or your company name, if your logo is an SVG — and there's no Voltane branding anywhere, including the page where a customer asks for access.

Once the customer has it, the document is closed

Issuing a document already fixes its figures. The moment your customer demonstrably has a copy — they opened it in the portal, downloaded the PDF, or approved or declined it — the rest of it closes too: the note on it, its type, the language it's written in. The document says so at the top, with the date.

This is on purpose. Correcting a document somebody is already holding leaves two versions of it carrying one number, and only one of them is on their desk. The way to change what they owe is a credit note, which is a new document that says what happened. Everything else still works as before: registering payment, voiding, crediting and writing off are all untouched.

Nothing is closed by sending. An email can bounce, sit in a spam folder or go to an address nobody reads — so an issued document nobody has opened yet can still have its note corrected.

Requiring more than one signature

Some offers need sign-off from more than one person on the customer's side — a manager and a finance contact, say. On the offer, pick which of the customer's contacts must approve. Each one gets their own email with their own personal link, and the offer is only approved once everyone you picked has signed off; if any one of them declines, the offer is declined for everyone. You can follow along on the offer itself — who's approved, who's still pending — and every signature ends up on the accepted PDF.

From offer to invoice or proforma

Once an offer is approved, you choose what comes next on the offer itself: Generate invoice, or Generate proforma when you want to be paid before you deliver. Your customer doesn't approve the proforma again — their acceptance of the offer comes with it, signature included. An approved proforma becomes an invoice the same way.

If the goods aren't on the shelf, Generate invoice says so and waits. An invoice takes the stock, and a product that doesn't allow overselling can't go below zero: restock it, or allow overselling on the variant. A proforma can always be made — it holds the stock rather than taking it.

Convert approved offers automatically is on by default: an approved offer instantly becomes an issued invoice, emailed to the customer and linked back to the original offer. Prefer to decide per offer? Turn it off in your team settings. If the invoice can't be made because of stock, you're still told the offer was approved.

Reminders that send themselves

Unpaid invoices are chased by an escalating series of reminder emails (before the due date, on it, and at 1/7/14/30 days overdue). Unanswered offers get their own gentler cadence (7/14/30 days). By default each reminder waits for your one-click approval, and you see its text before it goes out — so the robot never surprises a customer without you knowing.

A reminder rule starts from the day you switch it on. Steps that came due before that are skipped, so turning a rule on doesn't send a backlog of reminders about old invoices. Your dashboard still points you to every invoice that's overdue.

Approving one takes you straight to the invoice, with the reminder open and ready to read. You see the email exactly as your customer will get it, next to everything you need to judge it: what is still outstanding, what has already been paid, and which reminders have gone out before. Send it, or pick a different step from the list — any step you haven't already sent is available, because you are the one looking at the message.

Nobody is chased for an invoice they never received. If you haven't sent the invoice itself yet, no reminder is created for it, and the invoice will tell you so rather than leaving you wondering. The same goes for offers and credit notes: neither is a debt, so neither gets chased.

Some customers should never get a reminder. A key account you settle by phone, a sister company, someone on a payment plan: tick Don't send automatic payment reminders on the customer's edit page, and the reminder rules leave their invoices alone. The customer page shows it under Terms. You can still send a reminder yourself from the invoice.

Every reminder carries a way to pay — your bank details and payment reference, and a payment button as well when you have a payment provider connected.

When an invoice is never going to be paid

Sometimes the money simply isn't coming. The debt collector comes back with nothing, the customer is gone, or chasing it further costs more than it's worth.

Don't void the invoice. Voiding says the sale never happened, and that isn't true — you delivered, you invoiced, and you already declared the VAT on it in the return for the quarter you sent it. Voiding it now quietly changes a return you have already filed, and throws away the record that the customer ever owed you anything. And voiding is final: a voided document can't be issued again. If you voided one by mistake, make a new document or a credit note.

Instead, open the invoice and choose Write off. You can add a short reason, which is the first thing your accountant will ask for.

The invoice itself doesn't change at all — same lines, same totals, same VAT, same date, same number. What changes is what happens around it:

• It stops counting as money you're expecting, so it leaves your outstanding figures.
• Reminders stop. Nobody gets chased for it again.
• The VAT on it stays exactly as it was. That's the whole point of writing off rather than voiding: the sale happened, the tax was owed, and only the expectation of payment has changed.
• Your customer can still open the invoice in the portal and download the PDF — they may well need it for their own books — but the payment options are gone, replaced by a short note explaining that there's nothing left to pay.

Only a sales invoice you've actually sent and that hasn't been paid can be written off. A draft doesn't owe anything yet, and a paid invoice has nothing to give up on.

VAT recovery has its own timing. For supported Dutch invoices, Voltane records the recoverable amount when you write off the debt or when it remains unpaid one year after its due date, whichever comes first. Ordinary invoices can contain several VAT rates and earlier partial credits. A single used-goods line under the individual margin scheme is supported when its purchase cost is known. The adjustment records both the taxable amount and VAT; later payments restore the appropriate share. Cases without enough evidence or with an unsupported VAT treatment appear for your accountant to review. The original invoice and any filed figures stay intact.

Offers are called offers

An offer, a proforma and a credit note each live on the same screens as an invoice. The breadcrumb and the browser tab say which of the four you are working on, so a page reached through Create offer reads as an offer throughout.

The web address says /invoices/… for all four. Nothing you do is affected by it.

How your invoice numbers are built

Under Settings → Invoice settings you choose the shape of your numbering. Three placeholders get filled in for you:

So the default {TYPE}-{YEAR}-{SEQ} produces INV-2026-0001, and the offer before it was OFF-2026-0001 — each kind of document counts on its own.

{TYPE} follows your team's language, so a Dutch team gets FAC for a factuur where an English one gets INV. Offer, proforma and credit note happen to shorten to the same three letters either way. Changing your team language changes the prefix on documents issued from then on; the ones already numbered keep what they were given.

You are not obliged to use all three. {YEAR}-{SEQ} gives you 2026-0001, and plain {SEQ} gives you 0001. Anything you type outside the braces is kept exactly as written, so F{YEAR}.{SEQ} produces F2026.0001.

Two things worth knowing before you change it:

• Numbers already issued never change. A document keeps the number it was given; the new shape applies to the next one.
• The counter can restart each year, which is the usual choice, or run on unbroken. That is the separate setting right beneath the format.

Changing the format part-way through a year is allowed and sometimes necessary, but your accountant will want the sequence to stay traceable — an unbroken run, or a clean break at the start of a period.

Tax evidence and reviewed periods

The invoice sidebar shows VAT with the transaction classification. Use its heading or chevron to expand the relevant countries, where those values came from and the retained VIES verification date. The information icons explain each field. Known values are reused. The Edit tax details button appears inside the expanded section for drafts. Use it only when an establishment, dispatch country or delivery term needs changing; Save applies those changes and Cancel leaves the invoice as it was. Issued documents show their saved evidence.

Specialist line fields appear when relevant to your team or transaction. EU-KOR classification appears for participating teams and relevant historical turnover, or when a special classification is already saved. Ordinary sales use the ordinary category automatically. If needed, record a capital asset, new means of transport or other special supply. Goods dispatched from another country still require the applicable tax review before issue.

If VAT returns are enabled for your team, review the exceptions and sources before handing over the figures. Download JSON, CSV, Excel or PDF. EU-KOR exports show review issues and the exchange rates used for turnover in other currencies. If the source document's original currency is missing, restore it from the original source before relying on the turnover figure; a converted amount alone cannot establish it. A user with return-management access can mark a period prepared or filed after submitting it externally; Voltane does not submit it for you. Until a period is filed, the return shows its deadline: you file and pay by the end of the month after the period. Before you mark it filed, the return lists what it can't file as it stands, such as a sale without a VAT classification or a purchase in another currency without an exchange rate. Put those right first. If you file anyway, say why: your reason is kept with the period. Points to review are shown when you file, but they don't stop you. EU-KOR filing waits while national approval rules are unconfirmed. An EU B2B service invoiced while the customer's first VAT number was pending can be prepared, but filing waits for a later verified number for that same business and a complete ICP listing. Filed figures remain visible beside later differences. Ordinary issue and backdating into a filed period are blocked. A credit against a filed invoice asks for a correction reason and retains the original and credit in the audit trail.

Purchases whose invoice reached you in a different period than its printed date are listed beside the return and in the export, so you can discuss them with your accountant. The return itself still uses the invoice date.

The VAT return page shows every box under the form's own headings, and a card For your return at the Belastingdienst with the same figures in whole euros, rounded in your favour, including 5a, 5b and the total, ready to type into the portal. The CSV, Excel and PDF exports are in your team's language; the JSON export is meant for software and keeps English field names.

If a VAT recovery is recorded on an unpaid invoice, have that correction reviewed before crediting the original supply. Check the review list for cases whose VAT treatment or evidence prevents automatic recovery.