BOOMED (almost) - advice needed.

[7specialgems]

I have never had a contract that has the self-billing item as a feature of it.

Agencies I have worked with in the past have instead insisted on me signing a form that allows them the option of managing my invoices on my behalf and confirming that I will not send in invoices.

I never sign that form - I want to know exactly what date the invoice went in, the tax date on it and (in conjunction with the clause for payment timescales in my contract) what date the payment is due by (first late date -1).

For that comfort, I submit my own invoices.

Additionally (and this is a personal preference and opinion) I like all my invoices to look the same (style, company logo etc). If I got picked up for IR35 and I had a different Invoice style per client, I would worry that this would be construed as a weak indicator that I am inside IR35.

If my main line is a six month contract and I have other evening/weekend engagements on the side of that, I like the idea of being able to point to my regular invoices for that six month contract in the context of all the other ones and saying "look its just another business engagement, here are some other ones".

[Wanderer]

My reluctance to accept self billing is that unless I'm wrong, it's my companies responsibility to ensure all figures, ie VAT are correctly calculated and applied.

Yes, that is correct. It puts the burden back on you to make sure they pay the correct amount and they don't always get it right. Without self billing, you raise an invoice it's up to them to check that it's correct (though to be fair, the contractor doesn't always get it right either).

When the agency is using self billing, I just keep a spreadsheet showing each weekly timesheet, the date submitted and the amount I expected to be paid. This was reconciled against the self billing invoice when it arrived. To be honest, it wasn't that much extra admin.

It's posited it will be 30 days. That however depends upon when the agency generate the self billing invoices.

I've wondered about this too. Could the agency wait (say) 60 days then generate an invoice and pay it on 30 day terms?

When I've done self billing, the agency generated an invoice a few days before paying my company. Technically their payments were made within 3 days of the invoice date, though the invoice wasn't raised until 25 days after the work was completed and a timesheet submitted.

It also raises the question of being able to invoice the agency when you have no signed timesheet or to invoice the agency for penalties and interest for late payment. How would that sit with self billing? I don't know.....