What the catalog is for
If you invoice the same services or products repeatedly, typing description, price, and VAT rate every time is both slow and a source of inconsistency. The article catalog is your reusable master data: define an item once in Settings → Articles, then pull it into any invoice line with two keystrokes.
Creating and managing articles
Each article carries: SKU, name, description, category, unit, net unit price, VAT %, and optional tags. You can create, edit, and deactivate articles from the Articles tab.
- SKU — 1 to 50 characters: letters, digits, underscore, hyphen. SKUs are unique per company, so two of your companies can happily reuse the same code.
- Category — pick from Services, Goods, Licenses / Royalties, Subscription, or Other revenue.
- Deleting is soft. Removing an article deactivates it rather than erasing it — invoices that used it keep their history intact.
Articles can be managed by Owners, Admins, and Bookkeepers; every change is audit-logged.
Country-validated VAT rates
An article's VAT rate must be a real rate of your company's invoicing country — the form rejects anything else. The built-in rate charts:
| Country | Accepted VAT rates |
|---|---|
| Cyprus | 0, 5, 9, 19 % |
| Germany | 0, 7, 19 % |
| Austria | 0, 10, 13, 20 % |
| Greece | 0, 6, 13, 24 % |
| Switzerland | 0, 2.6, 8.1 % |
| United Kingdom | 0, 5, 20 % |
This catches typos like 18% in a 19% country at data-entry time — long before an invoice is on the line.
Net in, gross derived — never the other way
You maintain the net unit price only. The gross price is always computed as net × (1 + VAT/100), with exact decimal arithmetic at 4 decimal places. There is no gross field to keep in sync, so net, VAT, and gross can never contradict each other on an article.
Using articles in the invoice editor
Every line item in the invoice editor has an inline article combobox:
- Search — start typing to find catalog items; selecting one auto-fills the line's description, unit, net price, and VAT rate, and links the line to the article.
- Inline create — if the item doesn't exist yet, create it right there (name, SKU, net price, VAT) without leaving the invoice. It lands in the catalog for next time.
- Unlink — detach a line from its article to turn it back into a free-form line you can edit independently.
- Ad-hoc lines — lines without any article are always allowed; the catalog is a convenience, never a requirement.
One detail worth knowing: when a linked line is saved, the article's SKU is snapshotted onto the line. Rename or deactivate the article later and your existing invoices still show exactly which item they referred to.
What the catalog does not do (yet)
Articles are pricing and description master data. Quantity discounts, price tiers, stock levels, article images, and price history are not part of the catalog today.
Related
- Create and send an invoice — where the combobox lives
- VAT schemes and VIES validation — zero-rate schemes override line VAT regardless of the article's rate
- Invoice numbering sequences — the other Settings tab you'll touch during setup