Self-billing is an arrangement where the buyer issues the invoice for a supply on the supplier's behalf, under a prior agreement between the two parties.
In a self-billing arrangement the buyer, not the seller, produces the invoice. The buyer takes its own record of what was delivered or consumed, applies the agreed rate, issues a document in the supplier's name and pays against it. The supplier issues nothing. It only works where the buyer holds the authoritative quantity data, which is why it is common in haulage and logistics, milk and crop collection, consignment stock, scrap and recycling, temporary staffing and royalty payments. VAT law treats it as an exception to the normal rule that the supplier invoices, so it rests on a prior agreement between the two parties and on a way for the supplier to accept or contest each document.
Commercially, self-billing removes an entire class of work rather than speeding it up. There is no invoice to wait for, no invoice to chase at month end, and no price or quantity mismatch to investigate, because both sides are looking at one dataset instead of two. Accruals become predictable and payment can follow the receipt by a fixed number of days. The trade is that the responsibility moves to the buyer: the rate, the VAT treatment and the supplier's tax status all have to be right on your side, and if they are not, the correction is yours to make.
Business Central has no self-billing document type. What teams use instead is the ordinary purchase side: quantities come from posted receipts, pulled onto a purchase invoice with Get Receipt Lines so that nothing is retyped, the document number comes from your own number series rather than the supplier's, and the printed output that goes to the supplier needs a custom report layout because the standard purchase invoice report is designed as an internal document. There is no built in acceptance loop for the supplier, no automatic Self-billing mention on the layout, and no flag on the vendor card that marks a supplier as self-billed and blocks incoming invoices from that vendor. The e-document framework is built around receiving supplier invoices and sending sales documents, so transmitting a self-billed invoice electronically means configuration work or an extension.
You self-bill haulier V20400 monthly. In June 2026 the transport orders produce 128 posted receipts at the contract rate of CHF 145.00 per run, so the net amount is CHF 18 560.00. At the Swiss standard VAT rate of 8.1 percent that is CHF 1 503.36, giving a document total of CHF 20 063.36. You issue document SB-2026-06-014 dated 30 June from your own number series, send the PDF to the haulier the same day, and the agreement gives them ten days to object. Payment terms of 30 days from document date put the transfer on 30 July.
The failures are almost always about things changing without the invoice changing with them. A contract rate is renegotiated and the buyer keeps self-billing at the old one for two months. A supplier deregisters for VAT, or their treatment changes, and the buyer keeps charging tax that is no longer correct. The supplier's own accounting sends an invoice anyway, and the buyer posts and pays it on top of the self-billed document. Teams control this by reconciling self-billed totals against supplier statements periodically, by keeping the acceptance evidence with the document, and by reviewing rate and tax status before each run. Because the requirements differ by country, have the arrangement and the document wording confirmed by your tax adviser before you start.
No. Self-billing replaces the supplier's invoice for a genuine supply and creates the payable. A purchase credit memo corrects or reverses an invoice that already exists.
Yes. Both EU and Swiss VAT rules build self-billing on an agreement between the parties and on the supplier being able to accept or contest each document, and the detailed conditions are national, so confirm them with your tax adviser.
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