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Credit note invoice format for corporations

have you ever been in a situation where you have delivered goods or services to your customer you have sent them an invoice but then you've realized you need to change the amount of money they should pay you or have you received an invoice from a supplier but the quality of goods or services they provided wasn't up to scratch so you feel that you shouldn't have to pay full price situations like this happen all the time in business and when they do customers and suppliers can use credit notes to sort things out welcome to bullseye money the channel that helps business owners like you understand finance and in this video we're going to go through everything you need to know about credit notes let's start by taking a look at what a credit note actually is a credit note is a document that is part of the purchasing process along with other documents such as quotes and invoices they are generally used when something has gone wrong during the purchasing process resulting in the supplier needing to provide a discount or refund to their customer which is often called a credit so what sort of things can go wrong during the purchasing process well lots of things a few examples are goods provided by a seller to a buyer are faulty or damaged services provided by a seller to a buyer are not up to standard goods or services have been delivered just fine however the seller has charged the wrong price on the invoice a previously agreed discount was not applied to an invoice a discount has been agreed after an invoice has been sent to the buyer or the buyer accidentally overpaid an invoice and needs a credit or refund whatever the reason when mistakes like this happen the seller needs to provide credit to their customer and they do this by sending them a credit note as you can probably tell from the examples we just covered credit notes can be different amounts and can be used in different ways depending on the situation for example a credit note could cover the entire amount of an invoice this effectively means that the customer will not pay anything for the goods or services they received one situation in which this could happen is if an entire shipment of goods was damaged in transit and had to be written off or sent back to the supplier in another example a credit note could be issued for part of the total invoice amount this usually happens if some of the goods or services provided aren't up to scratch or if the supplier accidentally overcharged their customer and in yet another example a supplier could issue a credit note that does not relate to any particular invoice at all this is because credit notes can be issued for any value at any time and for any reason they aren't always issued after an invoice has been raised another important thing to note is that credits received by credit notes do not necessarily have to be applied to any particular invoice it is quite common for customers to offset the credit against one or more future invoices they receive from the supplier so as you can see credit notes can be created for a variety of reasons they can be for any amount and there is flexibility with how they are applied to current and future invoices at this point you may be wondering why you would use credit notes at all rather than just deleting an incorrect invoice and sending your customer an amended invoice well this is because businesses are usually required to keep accurate audit trails of their transactions if you receive faulty goods from a supplier and you delete the invoice they send you because you aren't going to pay the full amount you may not have any evidence on record that you receive the faulty goods and you may need that evidence if there is a dispute a better idea is to keep the original invoice request a credit note and then keep both documents together in your system that way you have a proper audit trail of the events that happen during the transaction and one last thing about credit notes and that is to make sure they contain lots of information about the supplier the seller and the transaction a good rule of thumb is to include similar information on your credit notes that you include on your invoices such as business names addresses and contact details descriptions quantities and prices of goods and services and relevant tax amounts such as gst or vat the more information you include the better your audit trail will be so that's it for credit notes if you would like to learn more about the purchasing process check out our videos on invoices quotes and other related topics you