FirstPromoter is one of the very few affiliate tools that helps you with the difficult task of generating and managing invoices for EU companies.

FirstPromoter will generate self-billing VAT and Non-VAT invoices for all your affiliates. We do all the heavy lifting for you, from determining the correct invoicing format to VAT calculation and VAT id validation. We even notify affiliates if the invoicing details are incomplete or invalid so they can update them.

Disclaimer: We strongly recommend to check and send this article (How invoices are generated) to your accountant to verify if the process aligns with your country's legislation. We're not responsible for any accounting errors that might arise.

If invoicing is enabled, you'll need to generate invoices for payouts before paying them. First you'll have to generate draft invoices then to finalize them. Both actions are done in bulk, so it will take only a minute or two more compared to handling payouts without invoicing.

We consider that a good approach is to generate and finalize the invoices a few days before the actual payout date. This way you'll give affiliates that have invalid invoicing details some time to correct them. However, there's no fixed rule when to generate the invoices as long as they are finalized before the payments are made - it can be done the same day.

1. Go to Payouts section and click "View" for the month you want to generate the invoices. If you have unpaid payouts from previous months that you want to invoice, you can generate invoices for those months and merge them later into a single invoice per promoter (done in bulk as well).

2. Click the "Generate invoices" button from the notice that appears on the top of the page. You can also select only particular payouts to be invoiced.

3. Check the generated draft invoices on the "Draft" tab. You can click the "+" sign to see what payouts are included in the invoice (there can be multiple payouts per invoice).

Note that some payouts might not be eligible for invoicing. By default we generate invoices only for companies (affiliates that have a company name set).
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​You can let everyone get invoiced by enabling the option "Generate invoices for both individuals and companies" from Settings > Others tab. If you enable this option, make sure your accountant knows about this, working with individuals is complicated in some EU countries.

There might be situations where you have 2 or more draft invoices for the same promoter. In this case FirstPromoter will inform you and recommend you to merge the invoices into a single one. This is done in a single click.

4. Finalize invoices by clicking the "Finalize" button. If there are invoices with incomplete or invalid details, they won't be finalized and will appear on "Failed to finalize" tab.

If you hover the mouse over the warning icon on failed invoices, you can see what errors they have:

Another very useful feature is email notification when the invoice fails to get finalized because the promoter has invalid details. This will ask the promoter to update their details. Once the details are updated, the red warning sign will become yellow. This way you'll know which invoices were updated and you'll able to try finalizing them again.

You can edit the email or disable the notification, by clicking the "Invalid invoicing details email" link located on top-right side of the screen.

Payments for invoices are handled exactly the same as are for payouts. If you need more info about payouts please check this article.

Once you are on the "Invoices" section, click the "Open" tab and press the green "Pay invoices" button to pay in bulk. Like with payouts, you can select individual invoices to pay as well.

When an invoice is finalized it will appear on the affiliate dashboard. To view and download the invoices, the affiliate needs to click the "Payouts" link on top then on "Invoices".