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Commercial invoices and sales orders

Created on  | Last modified on 

Summary

What a commercial invoice or order is and where you can find it in Sage 50 Accounts.

Description

After Brexit, a commercial invoice or sales order can help speed up imports and exports by supporting customs and shipping checks.

Resolution

What does a commercial invoice or order show?

There's no legal format for a commercial layout. It contains the most common information needed when you complete the most common import and export formalities. The following information is normally included in a commercial layout:

    • Your company address
    • The receiver's address
    • For each item being shipped, the commodity code, also known as the tariff code or harmonised code, and a description of the goods
    • Total net weight (kgs)

NOTE:

The weight on each product is the Net weight exclusive of any packaging. If you need to add the gross weight to the invoice, enter this manually as you're unable to calculate this using Sage 50 Accounts. For example, you sell 10 items, but these can be sent in one box of 10, or two boxes of five.

 

  • The International Commercial Terms (Incoterm) that the goods are being shipped under. There's no legal set of Incoterms but the most common are maintained by the International Chamber of Commerce. These were updated in 2020 
  • The reason for export. - manual entry or use an analysis field to add a custom field
  • The value of the goods in the relevant destination jurisdiction’s currency
  • Your VAT and EORI number
  • Space for the vendor’s agent’s signature
  • Total Number of Packages - manual entry or use an analysis field to add a custom field

Generate a commercial invoice or order

In Sage 50 Accounts v27.1, and above you can create commercial invoices and orders. These contain fields from your software such as country of origin, weight, and commodity code from your product records and EORI number from Company Preferences. View an example.

  1. Go to Invoices and credits or Sales orders as required.
  2. Select the relevant invoice or order, then select Print.
  3. Select Layouts then select the commercial layout as follows:
    Type Description Filename
    Invoice layout A4 Commercial Invoice - Plain Paper (Print or Email) COMINVPLAINA4
    Sales order layout A4 Export Sales Order - Plain Paper (Print or Email) EXPSOPPLAINA4
  4. Press Preview, Print, or Email as required and follow any on-screen prompts.

The software generates the invoice with the additional commercial invoice information.

▼ Not using Sage 50 Accounts v27.1 or above?

If you have Sage Cover Extra or Sage Cover Premium or Essential Cover Plus or Essential Cover Expert, download and install the commercial layouts pack:

  1. Press download link: Download the commercial layouts pack.
  2. Press Sign In, enter your Sage website login details, then press Log In.
  3. Follow the on-screen instructions.

The A4 Commercial invoice - Plain Paper (Print or Email) layout is then available within Invoices and credits when you press 'Print'.

 

Customise your commercial template

You can change your invoice layout to meet your business requirements.

For information on the other changes you can make, you can view our customisation article.

 

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