Invoices and receipts

The receipt and invoice every buyer gets, credit notes for refunds, business buyers and the reverse charge, ShopFast's invoices to you, statements and exports for your accountant.

Every paid order gets a receipt email and a proper invoice. Every refund gets a credit note that corrects the invoice. You find all of it, and ShopFast’s own invoices to you, in Money → Invoices.

What buyers get

• A receipt email right after paying, with the invoice attached as a PDF and a link to download it again. Turn the attachment off in Money → Invoices → Settings (“Email the invoice PDF with every receipt”); the invoice is still issued and stays on the order page.
• The order page lists the invoice and any credit notes, each with a PDF to download.
• A credit note for every refund, partial or full, to the card or to store credit. It names the invoice it corrects and is emailed to the buyer with its PDF.
• Business buyers open “Buying for a business?” at checkout and add their company name and VAT or tax number. The number’s format is checked for their country, and both are printed on the invoice.

Orders that cost nothing, test orders and orders you imported from another platform get no real invoice. Test orders get a test invoice numbered in its own TEST- series, so your real numbering never skips.

What an invoice shows

Invoices follow the content the EU VAT Directive asks for (article 226), which the UK and most countries with VAT use too:

• a unique number from your store’s series, the issue date and the date of supply;
• who issues it and who sold it: legal name, address, VAT number and company number;
• the buyer: name and email, or the company with the person’s name below it, its VAT number and address when given;
• each line: description, quantity, unit price, discount, tax rate and amount before tax;
• the tax per rate (taxable amount and tax), the total, what was paid and what is due;
• the currency, how and when it was paid;
• the legal notes that apply: the reverse charge, the country whose rate was charged, the merchant of record, or why no tax is charged.

Amounts round per line, and the tax of each rate is worked out on the sum of its lines (the EN 16931 method), so the invoice total always equals what the buyer paid, to the cent. Dates are stored as ISO dates and printed the way the buyer’s country writes them. Invoices are in English, German, French, Spanish, Italian, Dutch, Portuguese or Polish: your default language, or the buyer’s when you turn on “Write each invoice in the buyer’s language”. Buyers in the US and Canada get Letter paper, everyone else A4.

PDFs are real, searchable text: tagged PDF/A-3 that screen readers can follow, with fonts embedded. Each PDF also carries the same invoice as UBL XML inside it.

Who issues the invoice

• ShopFast Pay: ShopFast is the merchant of record. It charges the buyer’s tax at checkout and pays it, so ShopFast issues the invoice under its company details (Swifty LLC) and names your store as the seller the buyer bought through.
• Your own payment setup: you are the seller, so the invoice is yours, under the legal details in Settings → General → Legal (the same details as Money → Invoices → Settings).

Tax on your own payment setup

ShopFast adds no tax at checkout on your own payment setup. Tell the invoice how you handle VAT in Money → Invoices → Settings:

When you charge VAT and a business buyer in another country gives its VAT number, the invoice shows the reverse charge: the buyer accounts for the VAT and none is charged.

Tax per product: e-books and exempt products

Each product has a Tax category (product editor, under More settings for the price). Most digital products take the buyer’s country’s standard rate. Two categories lower the tax:

• E-books take the reduced rate many countries have for books: 7% in Germany, 5.5% in France, 4% in Spain, none in Ireland or the UK, for example. Where a country has no reduced rate for e-books, they take its standard rate.
• Tax exempt carries no tax. The invoice marks the line as exempt.

With ShopFast Pay, ShopFast owes the tax, so these two count only once ShopFast checks the product. Until then it sells at the standard rate, and the editor shows the check as waiting. You hear from ShopFast in your inbox when it is approved or declined, with the reason. Changing the category later asks again.

On your own payment setup your category counts at once: with “My prices include VAT at the buyer’s country rate” an e-book takes that country’s e-book rate, and an exempt product carries no VAT under either “include VAT” setting.

An order can mix rates (an e-book next to software). Each line shows its own rate, and the invoice has one tax row per rate, each worked out on the sum of its lines, exactly as checkout charged it.

Business buyers and the reverse charge

With ShopFast Pay, a business buyer in the EU whose VAT number the EU’s VIES register confirms pays no VAT: the invoice says “Reverse charge” and shows their number. If VIES says the number is not registered, checkout asks the buyer to fix it or leave it empty and pay with VAT. If VIES does not answer, the buyer pays with VAT and the invoice notes the number could not be confirmed. UK, Swiss, Norwegian, Australian and other numbers are checked for their format only, so the buyer pays the usual tax and the number is printed on the invoice.

Numbering

Numbers are unique and run without gaps: each store has an invoice series and a credit note series, and a number is taken in the same step that saves the invoice, so a failure never leaves a hole and two orders never share a number. In Money → Invoices → Settings you choose:

• the prefix for invoices and for credit notes (LUMEN-000042, LUMEN-CN-000003);
• yearly numbering, a new series each calendar year (LUMEN-2026-0042);
• the start number, if you are moving from another system. It can only change before your first invoice.

An issued invoice never changes. To correct one, refund the order (in full or in part): the credit note is the correction.

Your settings

Money → Invoices → Settings holds your legal name, address, VAT and company numbers, the prefixes and numbering, your logo (shown at the top of every invoice), a footer note (bank details, a thank-you, a legal line), the language and paper size, and whether receipts carry the PDF. Preview PDF shows your latest order as it would be invoiced with the settings on screen, before you save.

For your accountant

In Money → Invoices:

• Sales lists every invoice and credit note with totals per currency. Download one as PDF or as UBL 2.1 XML that follows EN 16931, the European e-invoicing standard accounting software reads.
• Export gives one ZIP for a period (up to 1,000 documents): invoices.csv with one row per document and tax rate (credit notes negative, so a column adds up to the period), every PDF, and the XML if you tick it.
• Statements has each month’s statement of sales, ShopFast’s fees, refunds, disputes and payouts, as PDF or CSV, from the same ledger as Money → Financials.
• From ShopFast has ShopFast’s invoices to you: plan months, ShopFast Pay fees (one invoice per month and currency, issued once the month is over, already taken from your balance), and AI credits. A store with an EU or UK VAT number on file is invoiced under the reverse charge.

What this covers, and what still needs a person

Invoices follow the EU VAT Directive (art. 226) and the EN 16931 data model, which the UK, the EEA, Switzerland and most VAT and GST countries accept for invoice content. Some things are outside what a document can settle on its own:

• ShopFast’s own tax registrations. Invoices for ShopFast Pay sales carry ShopFast’s VAT number only once ShopFast is registered (the EU non-Union One-Stop Shop, UK VAT, and others where it sells). Until then they carry none, and their XML is not a complete EN 16931 invoice. ShopFast sets these in its configuration (PLATFORM_TAX_IDS).
• Your own registrations. On your own payment setup, registering for VAT, the One-Stop Shop or sales tax, and choosing the right setting above, is yours to do. Ask a tax adviser where you sell a lot.
• Countries that require clearance e-invoicing. Italy (SdI), Poland (KSeF), Spain (Verifactu and TicketBAI), France and Germany (B2B e-invoicing being phased in), India, Mexico, Brazil, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and others want invoices sent to a government system or in a national format. ShopFast’s XML is EN 16931 UBL, which several of them accept as a source, but ShopFast does not submit invoices for you; stores established there need a local e-invoicing provider.
• US sales tax is not worked out on invoices.
• E-book rates come from the booksellers’ federation table (2025) with the 2026 changes. Finland, Italy and Poland (where only books with an ISBN qualify) and Slovakia take the standard rate until ShopFast adds a reduced rate there.
• Chargebacks a bank decides against you do not create a credit note on their own. Refund through ShopFast when you agree to give money back, so the credit note follows.
• Gift cards and store credit lower the taxed amount on the invoice, the same way checkout taxed the order.
• Scripts. PDFs print Latin, Greek, Cyrillic and Vietnamese text. Names in other scripts (Chinese, Japanese, Arabic, Hebrew, Devanagari) print with ? in place of the characters for now; the XML and CSV keep them exactly.
• Keeping records. ShopFast keeps your invoices while your store exists. Many countries ask you to keep them for 6 to 10 years, so export each period’s ZIP for your own records.