My invoice was rejected, why?
Our tireless Accounting Guardian constantly checks that your invoices are accurate. If it detects that an invoice is incorrect, it will mark it as rejected and notify you so you can replace it with a proper invoice. Let's explore some typical examples:
Non-business expenses
Bad quality photos of receipts
List of payments
Screenshots of payment emails or confirmation screens
The PDF contains an embedded unreadable image
A payment order instead of an invoice
Blurry or Illegible Invoice
Does your document look like this?
Meals, drinks, food, clothes... You can't pay those with your corporate card, as they are not business expenses and we don't support them at Companio. If you go to Starbucks to get a Chai Latte, or to Zara to get a pair of shoes, you need to pay for that with your personal card. Remember that you must keep a strict separation between your personal funds and your corporate funds. This may differ from some setups in other countries or legislations, but being a freelancer is not the same as owning a company.
Companio supports businesses, freelancers, and professionals engaged in online activities. This means deductible charges will rarely come in a printed receipt, and we need invoices, not receipts, from you.
A receipt is not a proper invoice. It usually lacks important information, such as the invoice number, applicable VAT, and buyer and seller data.
Does your document look like this?
There are three problems with that photo:
First and foremost, this is not an invoice; it is a receipt. It lacks essential information about the buyer, applicable VAT, invoice number, and even the currency.
Additionally, this is not a deductible business expense; It's a grocery shopping list. Here you can see a list of our deductible expenses for online businesses. In general, personal expenses like food, meals, gas for your car, and clothes are not deductible.
Using OCR techniques, it is challenging to reliably extract information from such photos, especially if the picture is skewed or has poor lighting.
Please use proper electronically generated invoices or upload readable PDFs. It's the responsibility (and the duty) of the seller to give you a proper invoice. You cannot "make up" the invoice, as that would be documentary fraud.
Does your document look like this?
This is not an invoice; it is a list of payments. They may even be from different customers. As much as we would love to accept these kinds of files, we can't.
- Each invoice must contain a list of products or services sold to ONE and only ONE customer. You cannot "merge" multiple payments, tickets, or receipts into one invoice.
- Consider that multiple customers can be from multiple countries, or be businesses or individuals, with or without VAT, hence subject to multiple tax regimes.
- Of course, information about the buyer, seller, invoice number, issue date, etc., must be included.
The whole point of an invoice is understanding what this payment is about. Is this a sale or a purchase? From which seller to which buyer? What's the cost, are there any applicable taxes that need to be deducted or accounted for?
Does your document look like this?
This is not an invoice; it's just a screenshot from Wise. There is no information here that allows us to include this movement in your books.
We just know that you had a meeting with a customer, and that there was an expense related to that meeting somehow. We don't understand anything about the nature of this expense (is this a payment for some drinks? That is not a business related expense) or this seller (is it from Europe or not, does it have a VAT number?)... Changes in this information can drastically alter how the movement is included in your accounting books.
Remember that you cannot simply "make up" an invoice out of this. You need the seller of the goods or services to include a proper invoice.
Does your document look like this?
Again, this is not an invoice; it's not even a receipt; it is a payment confirmation. We can't simply figure out who is sending you this (well, we can, but we shouldn't, accounting is based on actual fact, not educated guesses).
In general, most invoices in PDFs contain text that can be read by our system. Even if the PDF contains an image, in most cases, we can extract that image and apply OCR techniques to read the text contained in the invoice. However, there are PDF generators that create a file that cannot be read. This situation is easy to detect because you can't "copy and paste" the text from the PDF viewing tool.
This usually happens with sales invoices generated with certain software. If you are in this situation, please try to generate readable PDFs where the text can be extracted, or generate PDFs that contain standard uncompressed images (such as JPG or PNG) that can be processed by OCR.
A payment order is generally not an invoice, as it lacks important information such as the invoice number, seller and buyer details, etc. The vast majority of providers offering digital services to your company provide a proper invoice instead of a payment order. Let's look at a very common example:
Does your document look like this?
This is a screenshot of a payment order from a well-known domain and hosting provider. However, this provider also offers invoices that can be conveniently downloaded from their web interface, and you can even set up the delivery address for PDF invoices to your Email Invoice Dropbox.
This is a proper invoice from the same provider.
Does your document look like this?
If your invoice appears blurry or the image quality is poor, making it difficult to read, our system will not accept it.
The solution is to upload a clear and legible PDF invoice of higher quality. If uploading a PDF is not possible, ensure that the image is clear and of good quality. Please note that we only accept invoices in PDF, JPG, or PNG formats.
This is a proper invoice:
As you can see, it includes all the information we may need:
- Clear information about the buyer and the seller, including VAT numbers and (most importantly) their countries.
- Invoice number
- Issue date
- Clear pricing including the subtotal, applicable VAT, and total of the invoice.
First, make sure to get proper invoices from your suppliers and providers. All services for digital businesses (Google Workspace and Ads, Marketing services, Slack, SEO tools, chatbots, equipment providers, etc) will provide you with invoices in PDF format.
Being a digital business with online activity, you should be able to request proper invoices in digital format from your suppliers and providers. If it takes one of your provider more than a month to issue an invoice after you've paid for the service, we would recommend you to contact them to request a faster invoicing experience, or consider looking for new providers.
Regarding sales invoices, if your business has a low invoicing volume (you work as a freelancer and invoice your customers on demand) you may use our invoicing tool to create proper invoices.
Businesses with high invoicing volumes use software solutions such as Prestashop, Shopify, or WooCommerce on their websites or e-Commerce platforms to add a compliant checkout process that requests the required information from your customers (name, business information, address) to generate proper invoices. It would be unreasonable for these businesses to generate all the invoices for their customers manually. Most of these software solutions will allow you to add an email address where the invoices are sent, and you can specify our mail dropbox address to send them.
Non-business expenses
Bad quality photos of receipts
List of payments
Screenshots of payment emails or confirmation screens
The PDF contains an embedded unreadable image
A payment order instead of an invoice
Blurry or Illegible Invoice
Non-business expenses
Does your document look like this?
Meals, drinks, food, clothes... You can't pay those with your corporate card, as they are not business expenses and we don't support them at Companio. If you go to Starbucks to get a Chai Latte, or to Zara to get a pair of shoes, you need to pay for that with your personal card. Remember that you must keep a strict separation between your personal funds and your corporate funds. This may differ from some setups in other countries or legislations, but being a freelancer is not the same as owning a company.
Bad quality photos of receipts
Companio supports businesses, freelancers, and professionals engaged in online activities. This means deductible charges will rarely come in a printed receipt, and we need invoices, not receipts, from you.
A receipt is not a proper invoice. It usually lacks important information, such as the invoice number, applicable VAT, and buyer and seller data.
Does your document look like this?
There are three problems with that photo:
First and foremost, this is not an invoice; it is a receipt. It lacks essential information about the buyer, applicable VAT, invoice number, and even the currency.
Additionally, this is not a deductible business expense; It's a grocery shopping list. Here you can see a list of our deductible expenses for online businesses. In general, personal expenses like food, meals, gas for your car, and clothes are not deductible.
Using OCR techniques, it is challenging to reliably extract information from such photos, especially if the picture is skewed or has poor lighting.
Please use proper electronically generated invoices or upload readable PDFs. It's the responsibility (and the duty) of the seller to give you a proper invoice. You cannot "make up" the invoice, as that would be documentary fraud.
List of payments
Does your document look like this?
This is not an invoice; it is a list of payments. They may even be from different customers. As much as we would love to accept these kinds of files, we can't.
- Each invoice must contain a list of products or services sold to ONE and only ONE customer. You cannot "merge" multiple payments, tickets, or receipts into one invoice.
- Consider that multiple customers can be from multiple countries, or be businesses or individuals, with or without VAT, hence subject to multiple tax regimes.
- Of course, information about the buyer, seller, invoice number, issue date, etc., must be included.
Screenshots of payment emails or confirmation screens
The whole point of an invoice is understanding what this payment is about. Is this a sale or a purchase? From which seller to which buyer? What's the cost, are there any applicable taxes that need to be deducted or accounted for?
Does your document look like this?
This is not an invoice; it's just a screenshot from Wise. There is no information here that allows us to include this movement in your books.
We just know that you had a meeting with a customer, and that there was an expense related to that meeting somehow. We don't understand anything about the nature of this expense (is this a payment for some drinks? That is not a business related expense) or this seller (is it from Europe or not, does it have a VAT number?)... Changes in this information can drastically alter how the movement is included in your accounting books.
Remember that you cannot simply "make up" an invoice out of this. You need the seller of the goods or services to include a proper invoice.
Does your document look like this?
Again, this is not an invoice; it's not even a receipt; it is a payment confirmation. We can't simply figure out who is sending you this (well, we can, but we shouldn't, accounting is based on actual fact, not educated guesses).
The PDF contains an embedded unreadable image
In general, most invoices in PDFs contain text that can be read by our system. Even if the PDF contains an image, in most cases, we can extract that image and apply OCR techniques to read the text contained in the invoice. However, there are PDF generators that create a file that cannot be read. This situation is easy to detect because you can't "copy and paste" the text from the PDF viewing tool.
This usually happens with sales invoices generated with certain software. If you are in this situation, please try to generate readable PDFs where the text can be extracted, or generate PDFs that contain standard uncompressed images (such as JPG or PNG) that can be processed by OCR.
A payment order instead of an invoice
A payment order is generally not an invoice, as it lacks important information such as the invoice number, seller and buyer details, etc. The vast majority of providers offering digital services to your company provide a proper invoice instead of a payment order. Let's look at a very common example:
Does your document look like this?
This is a screenshot of a payment order from a well-known domain and hosting provider. However, this provider also offers invoices that can be conveniently downloaded from their web interface, and you can even set up the delivery address for PDF invoices to your Email Invoice Dropbox.
This is a proper invoice from the same provider.
Blurry or Illegible Invoice
Does your document look like this?
If your invoice appears blurry or the image quality is poor, making it difficult to read, our system will not accept it.
The solution is to upload a clear and legible PDF invoice of higher quality. If uploading a PDF is not possible, ensure that the image is clear and of good quality. Please note that we only accept invoices in PDF, JPG, or PNG formats.
So what does a good invoice look like?
This is a proper invoice:
As you can see, it includes all the information we may need:
- Clear information about the buyer and the seller, including VAT numbers and (most importantly) their countries.
- Invoice number
- Issue date
- Clear pricing including the subtotal, applicable VAT, and total of the invoice.
What can I do to prevent rejections?
First, make sure to get proper invoices from your suppliers and providers. All services for digital businesses (Google Workspace and Ads, Marketing services, Slack, SEO tools, chatbots, equipment providers, etc) will provide you with invoices in PDF format.
Being a digital business with online activity, you should be able to request proper invoices in digital format from your suppliers and providers. If it takes one of your provider more than a month to issue an invoice after you've paid for the service, we would recommend you to contact them to request a faster invoicing experience, or consider looking for new providers.
Regarding sales invoices, if your business has a low invoicing volume (you work as a freelancer and invoice your customers on demand) you may use our invoicing tool to create proper invoices.
Businesses with high invoicing volumes use software solutions such as Prestashop, Shopify, or WooCommerce on their websites or e-Commerce platforms to add a compliant checkout process that requests the required information from your customers (name, business information, address) to generate proper invoices. It would be unreasonable for these businesses to generate all the invoices for their customers manually. Most of these software solutions will allow you to add an email address where the invoices are sent, and you can specify our mail dropbox address to send them.
Updated on: 14/03/2024
Thank you!