This topic is a linked part of a larger work: “Edgeryders OÜ Company Manual”
Content
2. Steps for regular collaborators
3. Steps for occasional collaborators
1. Introduction
Process overview. Edgeryders’ decentralized accounting happens on edgeryders.freeagent.com. Every regular collaborator has an account there, using it to request all their payments from Edgeryders. This refers to both payments for invoices (when you invoice for your services on a contractual basis) and payments for the reimbursements of expenses (treated here).
No urgent payment requests, please. Make your payment requests early, because we don’t want to hurry our process for “emergencies”. (We will do so to avoid formidable catastrophes, but we will be annoyed 
) Your regular payment request needs up to a few days to be authorized by your project manager, until the Monday after for the payment to be made, and the usual time for bank transfers for the payment to arrive. (One bank working day to EU / SEPA countries, more to others.)
The process documented below is our suggestion for the default process. Project managers are largely free to organize their projects as they want, so they can choose a different process, esp. with good reasons. The only constant element is that bills have to end up in FreeAgent together with the “AUTHORIZED” note by the project manager (see below), because that is the interface to the Edgeryders payment manager.
Complain early about bad process. Whether it’s the default process documented below or a different one chosen by your project manager – if it works badly, it is your duty to complain early so that adaptations can be made before a project becomes an unenjoyable mess. Remember, it’s never the person, it’s always the process that is at fault. 
2. Steps for regular collaborators
Follow the steps in all sub-sections, in the order they appear. The first sub-section below is only relevant for the setup, preparing for the first time you submit a bill.
2.1. Setup: Get a FreeAgent account
Ask an Edgeryders director (preferably @matthias, @alberto, @noemi, otherwise also @johncoate or @nadia) to create a FreeAgent account for you. Just message them here on the platform and include your full name, e-mail address and if you need to send reimbursement requests or also invoices. Once your account has been created, you will receive an automated notification e-mail with an activation link to set your account password.
(Note to directors: Only Edgeryders directors can create FreeAgent accounts, because creating FreeAgent accounts requires permission level 7 “Tax, Accounting & Users”. To create the account, go to “user menu → Settings → Users”. Set the new account to permission level 2 “My Money” for reimbursements only or 5 “Invoices, Estimates & Files” for reimbursements and invoices.)
2.2. Write your invoice
Invoice template. You can copy or download our invoice template and fill in your information, or put the same information into your own template. The EU provides a good overview of all regulations that apply to information required on invoices.
Preferably no cross-project invoices. In one invoice, only invoice for services provided for one Edgeryders project. In the current version of FreeAgent, we can also register invoices that cover multiple projects, but for simplicity would prefer not to.
Include your payment info. Obviously, your invoice must include where Edgeryders OÜ has to send the payment. In case your payment info changed from the last invoice, please indicate this prominently on your invoice! For a regular bank account, full payment information would include the following items:
- Account holder.
- Bank name.
- Bank address.
- Account currency. The currency of the bank account (for example, EUR) should be included so we can decide on the payment method that offers the lowest fees. It is also needed so Edgeryders OÜ can send the transfer in the right currency, because a conversion on the fly is not (always) possible.
- IBAN. For non-EU bank accounts, replace the IBAN line with your account number and sort code, or whatever your national bank account scheme uses.
- BIC / SWIFT.
Value-added tax. For the purpose of VAT, Edgeryders OÜ is now treated similar to a consumer, not like a regular company registered in the European VAT system. As a result, you have to include VAT in much the same way you would include it on an invoice to a private individual in Estonia. Please go through the following list and choose the first case that applies. It ensures minimal bureaucrazy and also that VAT will not be paid unnecessarily by Edgeryders OÜ, so more of the project’s money can be distributed to you, the collaborators:
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EU suppliers with <10 kEUR/year cross-border intra-EU B2C turnover in the current year until invoicing
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When does it apply? (1) The business writing the invoice to Edgeryders OÜ must be registered inside the EU. (2) The business has an intra-EU cross-border turnover in services and the distance sale of goods, to non-VAT-taxable persons of less than 10 000 EUR in the current calendar year up to the date of invoicing and including the invoice to be written, and also of less than 10 000 EUR in the previous calendar year. Cross-border means excluding the turnover inside the country of business registration. (3) The business is also exempt from paying VAT in their country of registration, due to the turnover being below the national SME exemption threshold from VAT. (4) The business did not register for the EU’s cross-border SME scheme – if you did, move on to the next option.
In practice, most collaborators of Edgeryders EU can start with this scheme, including those whose contract with Edgeryders OÜ has a volume >10 000 EUR/year. That gives them time to prepare for switching to the cross-border SME scheme of the EU, which involves some bureaucrazy (see second case, below). -
What to do? Do not include any VAT or VAT IDs on your invoice. Typically, national legislation will demand that you include a hint on the invoice about being a VAT exempt small business in your country of registration. It is a good idea to also include a hint about why this regulation also applies to this intra-EU invoice (“National VAT exemption extended to intra-EU provision of services to non-VAT-taxable persons following Art. 59c of the EU VAT Directive”).
Details: In cases where you approach the 10 kEUR turnover limit described above but would not exceed it by much, you can in most cases opt to send an invoice to the next calendar year to avoid breaking the 10 kEUR threshold. If your accounting for turnover is based on money received, it is also sufficient to have Edgeryders delay paying the invoice until the next calendar year. -
Background information.
(click to open)
For official information about this mechanism, see here. For the legal text on which this is based, see Article 59c of the EU VAT Directive (“Council Directive 2006/112/EC”). According to that, businesses within the above turnover threshold qualify for a 2021 EU-wide VAT mechanism that makes the place of service provision be the country of their own business registration. (Note that the directive talks simply about “services”, while the VAT One Stop Shop info page talks about electronic services only; to be reconciled when needed.) So these businesses have to pay VAT of their home country and include that in their invoice. But here, they also quality for the SME exemption threshold from VAT (examples are 22 kEUR for Germany, 40 kEUR for Croatia, 25 kEUR for Belgium). So no VAT has to be included in their invoice, and no VAT to be paid on top of the invoice by Edgeryders OÜ.
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EU suppliers with <100 kEUR/year turnover EU-wide and <40 kEUR/year in Estonia
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When does it apply? (1) The business writing the invoice to Edgeryders OÜ has a turnover of less than 100 000 EUR per year across all of the EU. This very probably refers to VAT-taxable turnover only, so would exclude turnover from reverse charge invoices. (2) The business also has a turnover of less than 40 000 EUR from customers in Estonia. Again, this is very probably only VAT-taxable turnover, so for a business outside Estonia this would exclude reverse charge invoices written to businesses inside Estonia. For collaborators of Edgeryders OÜ this applies if contracts are up to 40 000 EUR per year.
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What to do? Apply the new 2025 cross-border SME scheme of the EU. To do so, apply for an EX number in the country where your business is registered. Then write an invoice to Edgeryders OÜ that includes your EX number, no VAT of any kind, and a reference that you are utilizing the EU’s cross-border SME scheme. In addition, you have to do a quarterly VAT return for EU-wide transactions, and follow some additional record-keeping requirements.
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Background information.
(click to open)
This scheme allows you to use the 40 kEUR VAT exemption inside Estonia (and similar exemptions in other EU member states) even though you are not a business registered in Estonia. So you do not need to include VAT on your invoice to Edgeryders OÜ, and Edgeryders OÜ does not need to pay VAT on top of your invoice via reverse charge. So contract volumes of up to 40 000 EUR per year become possible without Edgeryders having to pay VAT on the invoices it receives.
For official information, see here, and esp. see the Q&A section on that page under “Which goods and services are eligible for VAT exemption under the SME scheme?”. This shows that electronic services are included in the new cross-border SME scheme. It means that for such services, the 10 kEUR threshold discussed above is an additional simplification introduced: there is no obligation to apply the EU SME scheme if yearly cross-border turnover is below 10 000 EUR EU-wide.
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EU suppliers not matching above cases
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When does it apply? If the business writing the invoice to Edgeryders OÜ is registered inside the EU, but the two cases above cannot be applied because of exceeding the associated turnover limits, or the second case (2025 cross-border SME scheme of the EU) cannot be applied yet because the EX number registration has not yet been done.
This case applies both to the supply of goods and services, and for goods also independent of delivering them across a border or not. So it also applies to all goods and services from regular commercial suppliers (accounting, web hosting services, SaaS, physical goods etc.). -
What to do? Two cases:
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If your invoice is for electronic services or the distance sale of goods to Edgerydes OÜ, then it must include Estonian VAT and you have to transfer it to the Estonian state after collecting it from Edgeryders OÜ. You can use the EU’s VAT One Stop Shop mechanism to do this with the least amount of bureaucrazy possible (still crazy).
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If your invoices is for something else, your invoice to Edgeryders OÜ has to include local VAT (of the country where your business is registered).
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Background information.
(click to open)
In practice, this case will apply only to collaborators invoicing via larger companies (such as @owen invoicing via Amplo).
Invoices received with this scenario will be paid by Edgeryders OÜ incl. the contained VAT, and cover it from the releant project’s grant, again incl. the contained VAT. This is possible for EU grants, where input VAT is an eligible cost. It is however not a desirable scenario, as these parts of the grant amount cannot be paid out to collaborators. So if this scenario were to go on for a longer time (i.e. beyond the current TREASURE project), these collaborators should find or create a way to invoice that is covered under the above two VAT exempt scenarios.
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Non-EU suppliers.
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When does it apply? If the business writing the invoice to Edgeryders OÜ is registered outside the EU. (Hello to our collaborators from the United States and Mauritius!
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What to do? Write your invoice to Edgeryders OÜ as you would to any business customer abroad, not including any VAT. Edgeryders OÜ will have additional steps in this case, though.
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Background information.
(click to open)
Relevant so-called “authoritative” information has been found here:
If you receive services for business purposes from a supplier based outside the EU, you should usually pay VAT at the applicable rate in your country, as if you had supplied the service yourself (using the reverse charge procedure).
You can usually deduct this amount later on when you make your VAT declaration.
It does not matter if the services are “digital services” or not, that distinction is only relevant for B2C sales. Edgeryders OÜ is still a business since it is “engaged in economic activity”, even though no longer VAT registered in Estonia. So it has to find a way to do a so-called limited VAT registration elsewhere, and pay VAT there, without being able to get it back as it cannot apply the reverse charge procedure here. In practice, it will probably have to attempt a limited VAT registration in Germany since with @matthias, current management resides there.
Because Edgeryders OÜ has to pay VAT on such inputs and cannot reclaim it via pre-tax deduction, this scenario should be avoided where possible.
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No reverse charge! Since Edgeryders OÜ is no longer registered in the VAT system of Estonia, it cannot take part in the reverse charge procedure. Do not include the “reverse charge” keyword on your invoices to Edgeryders OÜ, and do not include the old, invalidated VAT ID of Edgeryders OÜ either. You may or may not include your own VAT ID, as you prefer.
Details about the VAT status change of Edgerdyers OÜ (click to open)
Until 2026-05-31, Edgeryders was registered in the Estonian VAT system and had a VAT ID ( EE101972833), like any normal company. Upon review, the Estonian Tax and Customs board decided that Edgeryders OÜ is not engaged in business inside Estonia, and deregistered it from the VAT system, effective 2026-06-01. Effects:
- Edgeryders’ VAT ID is no longer valid.
- The company is no longer entitled to reclaim input VAT on purchases (including VAT charged on invoices from Estonian suppliers).
- The reverse charge mechanism can no longer be applied on invoices sent to Edgeryders OÜ. Suppliers must issue invoices with applicable local VAT instead.
VAT regulation of the EU in more general (click to open)
For a company registered in the EU VAT system, having a VAT ID, different rules than above apply. This was the case for Edgeryders before, and perhaps again in the future at some point. Just to not lose this knowledge, here it is:
In almost all cases, the correct way is to put zero VAT on your invoice. Details: The VAT to include depends on what type of supplier you are, and your country of residence. Good authoritative sources of information are (from simple articles up to the full portal):
The major cases are:
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Add no VAT if you are invoicing for any services from a company registered in a member state of the European Union except Estonia (where Edgeryders OÜ is registered). Edgeryders will apply the reverse charge procedure for this case (see below). This applies independently of the type of service you invoice for (electronic, digitally supplied, or not) and independently of where you provided the service (in the country of the service provider, of the customer, or another country) and also independently of your own VAT status (VAT liable with EU VAT ID, VAT liable without EU VAT ID, or VAT exempt). Source:
The place of taxation is determined by where the services are supplied. […] The supply of services between businesses (B2B services) is in principle taxed at the customer’s place of establishment. (source)
There are some exceptions from this rule, documented here. The most relevant cases from there are for us:
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B2B and B2C restaurant and catering services, other than those supplied on board ships, aircraft or trains during the section of a passenger transport effected within the EU, are taxed at the place where the services are physically carried out [Article 55 of the VAT Directive]
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B2B services in respect of admission to cultural, artistic, sporting, scientific, educational, entertainment and similar events will be taxed at the place where those events actually take place [Article 53 of the VAT Directive]
(What are services anyway? In general, consider anything a service that is not just about selling a physical product, or a product and its installation. Catering is a service. Not sure if a print job is a service. We did not yet find any official EU definition of “service”.)
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Add no VAT if you are invoicing for services from outside the European Union. Relevant so-called “authoritative” information has been found here:
If you receive services for business purposes from a supplier based outside the EU, you should usually pay VAT at the applicable rate in your country, as if you had supplied the service yourself (using the reverse charge procedure).
You can usually deduct this amount later on when you make your VAT declaration.
It does not matter if the services are “digital services” or not, that distinction is only relevant for B2C sales.
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Add no VAT if you are invoicing for physical goods from a member state of the European Union except Estonia and you send the goods across a border (source). To write us an invoice without VAT for this case, you need to include our VAT ID:
EE101972833. -
Add no VAT if you are invoicing for physical goods from outside the European Union and you send the goods across a border. This is an import / export trade, where usually no local VAT is applied but we’ll have to pay EU import VAT at the point of customs.
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Add your country’s VAT if you are invoicing for physical goods from a member state of the European Union except Estonia and you do not send the goods across a border (derived from here). Example: Edgeryders ordered a print job in Belgium, for delivery inside Belgium. In this case, Edgeryders OÜ will not be able to get the VAT back, as we are not registered in Belgium.
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Add your country’s VAT if you are invoicing for physical goods from outside the European Union and you do not send the goods across a border. For example, when we purchase items in person in your shop.
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Add 20% Estonian VAT if you are a company registered in Estonia and your company is not exempt from VAT.
2.3. Submit your invoice for payment
For that, you have to add your invoice in FreeAgent (there called “bill”) and create a Dynalist task for its authorization:
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Go to "Bills → Add New Bill in FreeAgent. (In detail: click on “Bills” in the FreeAgent main menu, then on the “Add new bill” button in the top right.)
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Fill into “Supplier Contact” your name, selected from the dropdown.
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Fill into “Reference” the number or reference on your own invoice. This is needed to facilitate auditing of accounting data.
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Fill into “Comments” a short description of the services you performed, for example: “community management”. Usually, do not include the project name, as it will be included in its own field already. In case your payment info changed from the last invoice, please indicate this change prominently in this field (USE CAPS!) and not just on your invoice, because we otherwise may, in error, use the saved payment info from last time to execute the payment.
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Fill in the “Bill Date”. Usually you leave it as it is, the default being the present day. However, if you created your invoice in the past, fill in that day of course.
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Fill in the “Due Date”. Set it to the current date (where you upload the invoice to FreeAgent) to indicate that your invoice is due immediately. Otherwise, if you leave it at the default “invoice date plus one month”: that’s nice of you as it means you are ok with us paying you a month later
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Fill into “Total Value” the invoice amount in Euros. If your invoice is in a different currency, convert the total to Euros. For that, use the X-Rates Historic Lookup tool with the date of your invoice. Keep the link of your conversion, you need it later. (Other suitable but less great tools: XE Historical Currency Rates and ECB Currency Converter.)
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Fill in the contained Estonian VAT amount as 0%. The field will default to 0% VAT and 0% is always the right value. Reason: This field is meant for reclaimable VAT, while any other VAT amount is to be treated as a regular part of the invoice amount to pay. And Edgeryders OÜ cannot reclaim any VAT anymore since deregistering from the Estonian VAT system effective 2026-06-01. Even before, this was only for Estonian VAT, relevant only for invoices by our accountants.
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Select in “Category” the entry “Cost of Sales → Collaborators”. (
This is important since it has affects if Edgeryders can deduct the expense from its taxable profits.) -
Fill into “Comments” relevant additional information about the bill, if any.
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If your original currency is not Euro, include the link to the conversion you did. It has to include the date, and if possible the amount (example).
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If for some reason you want your invoice to be paid later, make this very visible by putting something like “NOT TO BE PAID IN 2018” at the beginning of the comment (and also adapt the “Due Date” field accordingly).
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Select in “Link to Project” the entry for the project you are working on.
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Leave the default “This Bill recurs” value which is “Does not recur”.
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Upload in “Attachment” the file of your invoice in PDF file format.
If your invoice is about a Horizon 2020 project, note that it has to include a timesheet, according to this process (in there, section “2.2. Creating an invoice for your worktime”).
For Horizon 2020 projects, the rate is 41.86 euros per hour. To calculate your bill, multiply the number of hours worked by 41.86. Be sure to cross-reference with your yearly contract to ensure you are billing the correct number of hours per year to add up to your salary. e.g. 14,400 euros/year = 344 hours * 41.86 euros. Your quarterly bill needs to match your hours reported. -
Click on “Create and Finish”.
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Ping your project manager for authorization. Send a link to the bill you created to your project manager, asking them to check and approve the bill. To find that link in FreeAgent, go to “Bills”, right-click on the reference corresponding to your bill, and choose “Copy link address”. Be sure to mention a deadline in case the bill payment is urgent – otherwise it will be typically the next Sunday plus one week, given that Monday is the payment day in Edgeryders.
You can choose any channel to notify your project manager, though DMs here on edgeryders.eu are probably the most suitable. This avoids moving to e-mail (which we avoid in Edgeryders), but at the same time has a proper notification system unlike the Discourse chat messages.
3. Steps for occasional collaborators
This is a simplified process for collaborators who will, as far as it can be foreseen, send us at most three bills in total. It does not need them to get a FreeAgent or Dynalist account, and can also be used by all collaborators while they do not have either a FreeAgent or Dynalist account.
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Create your invoice as a PDF. See the instructions for our regular collaborators (above) for a template and details about what VAT to charge.
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E-mail the invoice to your contact person at Edgeryders. This is simply the person from Edgeryders who contracted the service from you. They will care to enter it into the Edgeryders accounting system and authorize it, and the Edgeryders payment manager will then pay it.
4. Steps for Edgeryders OÜ
(If you only wanted to submit your bill to Edgeryders for payment, you can stop reading here. The following is only for staff of Edgeryers OÜ.)
The project manager is the person managing the Edgeryders project to which a bill refers. The payment manager is the Edgeryders management board member executing the payments from the bank account.
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Project manager: Register the bill in FreeAgent (if needed). This is only necessary for bills submitted via e-mail by occasional collaborators, our accountants etc.. Everyone else registers it as a bill in FreeAgent themselves. Use the “steps for regular contributors” in analogy to register the bill in FreeAgent.
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Project manager: Check and approve the bill. Check that the invoiced service has been delivered, any forex conversion is correct, and that the bill is correctly recorded and linked to your project in FreeAgent. To approve it, edit the bill record in FreeAgent and add to the beginning of the comment field, with the current date and your firstname:
(APPROVED [yyyy-mm-dd] by [name])
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Project manager: Check off the Dynalist task. The one that told you to approve the bill.
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Payment manager: Pay all approved bills on the next Monday. But do not just pay blindly: ask the project manager for explanations if there is anything you do not understand.
You can find all open bills around the top of the “Bills” page, and see which ones are approved right on that page, without having to visit each bill. Tip: Ctrl+F and search for “approved” to highlight all approved invoices.
If there are other duties that have not yet been made explicit, let me know and I will write them down. It’s just that I can’t live with fuzzy expectations …
