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Self-billing: when the client issues your invoice

It sounds like someone else doing your paperwork. In practice it is someone else writing a document you remain answerable for.

What actually happens

Under a self-billing arrangement your customer produces the invoice for your work, in your name, and sends you a copy. You issue nothing. Platforms, agencies and large buyers like it because they already hold the data — hours approved, deliverables signed off, rates agreed — so they can generate the document the moment the work is accepted, instead of waiting for you.

It is a legitimate arrangement, written into EU VAT law and into UK VAT rules. It is not a favour and it is not informal.

The two things that must exist before the first invoice

A prior agreement. Both sides have to agree, in writing and before any self-billed document is issued, that the customer will invoice on your behalf. An agreement written after the first invoice does not repair the first invoice.

A way for you to accept each one. The arrangement has to include a procedure by which you accept the documents raised in your name. Silence is usually treated as acceptance, which is exactly why the next section matters.

The document itself must carry the words self-billing. That wording is a mandatory particular, not a courtesy label, and its absence is the kind of defect an inspector notices immediately.

Who is answerable when it is wrong

Here is the part that surprises people. You remain responsible for the VAT treatment of an invoice you did not write. If your client applies the wrong rate, omits a required mention, or bills a supply that never happened, it is your VAT position that is wrong, not theirs.

Which turns "they handle the invoicing" into "I have to read every document they produce in my name". Most freelancers under self-billing check the total and nothing else. The total is the one figure the client rarely gets wrong.

Across borders: whose rules apply

When supplier and customer sit in different countries, the question is which country's invoicing rules the document must satisfy — yours or theirs. The general principle is that invoicing follows the rules of the member state where the supply is treated as taking place. Self-billing is one of the cases that decides that question rather than sidestepping it, and the answer is not always the one you would guess from where you are sitting.

The practical consequence: the document may have to follow rules you have never read, written by someone applying the rules they know. Ask your client, in writing, which country's invoicing rules they are applying. That single question surfaces the problem before it becomes a correction.

Self-billing and reverse charge together

These two arrive as a pair more often than not: a customer in another member state, accounting for the VAT themselves, who also writes the invoice. When that happens the document carries two mandatory wordings — the self-billing reference and the reverse charge reference. They are separate requirements and one does not imply the other.

A self-billed invoice that says "reverse charge" but never says "self-billing" is incomplete, and so is the reverse. It is a small thing to check and it is the most common defect on these documents. The full list of what belongs on the face of an invoice is on the invoice contents page, and the wording for the reverse charge itself is on reverse charge invoices.

Do not invoice the same work twice

Once an arrangement is in place, you stop issuing your own invoices for the work it covers. Two documents for one supply — one from each side — is a duplicate in both sets of books, and it is a genuinely difficult thing to unwind six months later.

The version of this mistake that actually happens: the arrangement covers one contract, you have a second contract with the same client, and you invoice that one yourself. Then nobody is sure which document covers which work. Keep the boundary of the arrangement written down.

Keeping the record when you did not write it

You are still expected to hold the invoices issued in your name, for the same retention period as the ones you write yourself. In practice self-billed documents arrive by email, sometimes as a link to a portal, and portals lose access when a contract ends.

Download them as you receive them. A PDF in your own folder is a record; a link into a client's system is a record only for as long as that client keeps you as a user.

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