Courier Business Stuff

Following on from my recent post What Details Need to Appear on a VAT Invoice for Courier Services in the UK?  I thought it might be useful to supply an editable invoice template to illustrate exactly what’s needed and to maybe provide a starting point for to enable same day couriers to design their own invoices which meet all the legal and business requirements.

Download the template here (MS Excel template file) or view it as a Read More…

Posted under Accounting Systems, Courier Basics, Courier Business, VAT

There are strict, but thankfully very simple, rules for what needs to appear on a VAT invoice in the UK.

To satisfy HMRC you need to include on your invoice:

The date of issue of the invoice.
A sequential number that uniquely identifies the invoice.
Your business’s name, address and VAT registration number.
The name and address of your customer.
Your customer’s VAT registration number (only if they’re VAT registered in another EU country and you’re invoicing without VAT).
The date of supply of services (the date you did the work).
A description of the services supplied (from a VAT point of view ‘Courier work’ would be OK – your customer may want more detail).
The VAT rate applied (normally 17.5%).
Total amount of VAT payable.
The total amount payable for the whole invoice excluding VAT.
The total amount of VAT charged at each VAT rate (normally just one entry for the 17.5% rate).
The unit price of the services supplied and the number of units charged for – if this is normal practice for your industry (as far as I’m aware it isn’t normal practice in the courier industry) or required by your customer. In practice you can ignore this unless you charge your customer by an agreed price per mile or hour worked AND they’ve asked you to include the figure on your invoice. For example ‘200 miles @ 70p/plm’.

To satisfy Companies House and Trading Standards:

If your business trades under a name other that its actual Read More…

Posted under Accounting Systems, Courier Basics, Courier Business, Courier Financial Issues, Late Payment, VAT

I don’t see how you can complain that they all look similar. If everyone was to stop using ‘Network’ invoices and starts using Quickbooks you’d have the same situation.

Agreed that it’s a total ballache having the same company issuing two different invoices, pure stupidity really. If they’re going to send their own invoice then why raise the ‘Network’ invoice to start with? It’s easy to avoid the double payment problem though – just match the invoice against jour job reference or purchase order when the invoice comes in. You can only pay for each jon once, so the second invoice goes in the shredder.

I’m not sure what the “not technically legal” refers to, apart from the absence of correct business names on some of them. That’s just as common with companies’ own invoices though.
 

Posted under Accounting Systems, Courier and Freight Exchanges, Courier Basics, Courier Financial Issues

Microsoft Office Accounting Express

I’ve not used but I’ve had a good look at it and it seems to cover the basics quite nicely.

Posted under Accounting Systems, Courier Financial Issues

lynyrd wrote:

Admin wrote:
I was having a yap with MTvan a couple weeks ago, and I believe they have something in the pipeline which will be free to their members…

I can get some more details if you want them…

if its stand alone software that cool

if its within mtvan no-one will use it

No-one in their right mind that is……

….some will.

From Tim’s keyboard:

Quote:
It’s similar to a lot of “courier software” packages, in that you can book a job, add a courier, add extras like waiting time etc, review the jobs before running pay and invoicing, print invoices, produce a list of invoices, and mark them paid.

The only difference is that it’s all on-line.

I think I’ll give that one a miss then.

Posted under Accounting Systems, Booking Software, Courier and Freight Exchanges

Can you tell us how you managed to make a Paypal payment of £0.00 in order to access the free download?

Posted under Accounting Systems, Booking Software

I think you’re thinking about it the wrong way Dave. It’s an accounts package rather than a courier booking & management package.

I’d have thought that the normal way of using QB is just to price your jobs manually and enter them individually – so the issue of rates for each customer doesn’t come up. Having said that you could set up your standard mileage rate for each vehicle as an ‘Item’ in QB and have it automatically apply a discount on a per customer basis. You’d still have to enter the mileages for each individual invoice line though so there’s not much advantage in doing that and it would be a bit complicated.

If you want a package with the sort of functionality you’re after then you need to consider Journeeze or DBS – both of which can export data to QB or Sage, or Controller, which has a bit of a clunky feel to it but is pretty fully featured, can export data to Sage and only costs £30/month. You can download a trial of that from www.couriersystems.co.uk .
 

Posted under Accounting Systems, Booking Software

Weren’t you looking to replace your booking system Nigel? I see they’re doing the ‘new’ Windows version of Controller for £30 a month rental at the moment instead of an upfront purchase price.

It’s still got the nasty DOS screens when it comes to printing invoices and reports off though.

http://www.couriersystems.co.uk/

Posted under Accounting Systems, Booking Software