Not every document that asks you for money is an invoice. Financica files those documents under expenses as a payment request: a document kind of its own, alongside invoices and credit notes, with its own fields, its own posting rules and its own place in the VAT return.
What counts as a payment request
A payment request is a demand for payment that is not a tax invoice. Typical examples:
- A social contribution notice from the ONSS/RSZ or a social insurance fund.
- A tax prepayment notice or a tax assessment (avertissement-extrait de rôle, aanslagbiljet).
- An insurance premium notice.
- A rent call or a building service-charge call from a landlord or syndic.
- A loan or lease instalment.
- Membership dues, regulator fees, court costs, a fine.
What these have in common: they carry no VAT you can recover, they often have no invoice number, and they recur. A contribution notice arrives every quarter with the same reference and a different period.
A payment request is still an expense in Financica. It has a counterparty, a due date, a total, it can be paid from a bank transaction and it shows up in your reports once approved. What changes is how it is described and how it is posted.
How a document becomes a payment request
When you upload a document, receive one over Peppol or import a UBL file, Financica decides the document kind before showing it to you. It looks, in this order, at:
- The issuer's history. If you have previously marked a document from this supplier as a payment request, the next one from the same supplier is a payment request too.
- Known public bodies. A list of issuers known to send payment requests over Peppol, starting with the Belgian ONSS/RSZ. Public bodies on the Peppol network send their notices as ordinary invoices, so the envelope alone cannot tell you what the document is.
- The document itself. A heading such as "avis d'échéance", "notice of assessment", "vervaldagbericht" or "payment request"; lines the document marks as outside the scope of VAT; or no VAT and no supplier VAT number on a document that also has no invoice number.
When none of these apply, the document is an invoice.
Changing the kind
The kind is a field like any other until the document is approved. On the expense page:
- In edit mode, use the Document kind field and pick Invoice, Credit note or Payment request.
- Or open the actions menu ("...") and choose Mark as payment request, Mark as invoice or Mark as credit note.
When you change the kind of an inbound document, Financica remembers your choice for that supplier and applies it to the next document from the same issuer.
Once the document is approved, the kind is locked with the rest of the content. Click Remove approval first, change the kind, then approve again.
What the page shows
A payment request has no invoice number of yours to quote, so the expense page shows what identifies it instead:
- Reference, the number the issuer prints on the notice (a contribution account number, a tax file number, a policy number).
- Period, the months or quarter the request covers.
The page hides what a payment request does not have: the invoice number, the supplier's VAT number, the VAT rate and VAT amount on each line, the deductibility setting and the VAT breakdown in the totals. The list shows it with a Payment request badge, and the delete confirmation and other messages call it a payment request, never an invoice.
If a request has no reference, no period and no due date, the checks panel warns you: without at least one of them, the next notice from the same issuer cannot be told apart from this one.
Posting to your books
Approving a payment request posts it like any other expense, with one difference: no VAT legs are created. Each line goes in full to the account you categorize it to, and the total goes to accounts payable.
A payment request cannot carry VAT. If the header or a line still states a VAT rate or a VAT amount, the checks panel blocks approval and asks you to move the amount into the line itself. Any levy printed on the notice, an insurance premium tax or a stamp duty, is part of the line amount, not a tax figure.
Which account you categorize each line to decides what the request means for your books:
- An expense account records a cost: the premium notice, the property tax, the membership dues, or the social contribution when your payroll is not booked in Financica.
- A liability account settles something already on your balance sheet: the quarterly contribution notice after payroll has already booked the contributions payable, a tax prepayment against the provision, a loan instalment against the loan. Nothing lands in your income statement; the request only moves the debt from that account to accounts payable.
The same notice can be either, depending on how your organization keeps its books. The choice is yours, line by line, before you approve.
Belgian VAT return
A payment request never touches the VAT grids (54 to 64). Its base is decided line by line, from the account each line was posted to:
- Lines posted to an expense account go in grid 82 (purchases of services and miscellaneous goods), with no VAT. This is how the Intervat guidance treats purchases that are exempt from VAT or outside its scope: taxes, social contributions, insurance premiums, professional dues.
- Lines posted to a balance-sheet account are not a purchase and are left out of the return. The VAT return page lists the amount under "Payment requests settling a liability already on the balance sheet (not a purchase)" so you can see it was considered.
- Payment requests you issue are not a sale and are left out too, listed as "Issued payment requests (not a sale)".
See VAT returns for how the return is built.
Duplicate detection
Invoices are matched on their invoice number. Payment requests have none, so Financica identifies them by issuer, reference and period instead, with the due date as the fallback when the notice states no period. Two documents from the same issuer with the same reference and the same period are flagged as duplicates on the expense page, and an upload that matches an existing request on those fields, plus the currency and the total, links to the existing record instead of creating a second one. The issue date is ignored on purpose: a notice reprinted on another day is still the same notice.
Finding payment requests
- Expenses list. Each payment request carries a Payment request badge. The Filters dialog has a Document kind filter to show only invoices, credit notes or payment requests.
- Transactions. A bank transaction linked to a payment request names it as such in its linked payments.
- Documents library. The library files the attachments under the Incoming payment requests and Outgoing payment requests categories, which you can filter on and bulk download like the other categories. See Document library.
What a payment request cannot do
A payment request has no outbound shape yet, so Financica refuses to:
- send it over Peppol, by email or through a connected bank's e-invoicing service;
- export it as a UBL or Factur-X file;
- render it as a PDF invoice.
If you need to issue a demand for payment to a customer, create an invoice instead.