A BAS chart of accounts for a service company, and the nine accounts invoicing touches

TL;DR

BAS is the chart of accounts almost every Swedish company starts from, and almost every one of them then changes. Nine accounts carry every customer invoice a service company sends. They are defaults rather than universal truths — the account on the line always wins — but knowing which nine and why makes the difference between a ledger you can check and one you can only total.

The nine

Those are the names written into the SIE file alongside the numbers, in Swedish, because the chart of accounts is written in Swedish and the person importing the file reads Swedish.

Why sales are split by rate

Because BAS splits them, and because the split buys you a check.

The revenue account and the VAT account of one line are meant to be checkable against each other. Divide a quarter's 2621 balance by its 3002 balance and you should get 12,00 per cent. Do it for the 2611/3001 pair and you should get 25,00.

Now suppose one 12 per cent sale of 11 760,00 kr was posted to 3001 by mistake, with its VAT correctly on 2621. Take the conference invoice from VAT per line and misfile it that way:

3001 = 24 000,00 + 11 760,00 = 35 760,00
2611 =  6 000,00
6 000,00 / 35 760,00 = 16,78 %

Sixteen point seven eight per cent. Not 25. The check fires, and it fires on a ratio that anybody can compute from a trial balance without knowing anything about the underlying invoices. Post the 12 per cent revenue to the 25 per cent account and that check breaks quietly — which is to say it breaks loudly, for anyone who runs it.

Zero-rated sales are the exception and are handled separately, below.

Why 1513 exists

This is the account most invoicing systems do not have, and its absence is expensive.

A ROT or RUT invoice is settled by two payers. The customer pays their share; Skatteverket pays the rest. If both halves sit on 1510, then ninety days after issue an ageing report shows the whole amount as an overdue customer debt — and the receivables list you work from every Monday is wrong about every deductible job you have done.

Split them, and the report tells the truth. Take the bathroom job from How ROT is calculated:

1510  Kundfordringar                  53 998,00
1513  Kundfordringar – delad faktura   12 615,00

Ninety days out, the 1510 row is a customer who is genuinely late and needs chasing. The 1513 row is a claim in progress with the tax authority. Two different conversations, two different people to have them with, and one of them is not a reminder letter.

The same split runs through the receivables ledger itself: what a customer owes is the total less the part claimed from the state less what has already been paid, which is why a ROT invoice whose customer has paid their half cannot be chased at all.

When Skatteverket decides, the amount leaves 1513 as a voucher of its own in the next export: what Skatteverket paid goes to 1630, the tax account, and anything it refused goes back to 1510, because the customer owes it again. That is a tenth account, but it belongs to the claim, not to the invoice.

Why 3740 is a row rather than a fudge

Öresavrundning is a few öre of income or expense. It could be absorbed into the total; it is not.

Fold it in and the lines printed above no longer add up to the figure printed below them. The first person to notice is the bookkeeper reconciling against the bank, and what they notice is a discrepancy of under a krona that takes twenty minutes to find. Give it its own account and its own row on the invoice and there is nothing to find.

Zero-rated lines get no default

An invoice line at zero per cent gets no automatic account, because the account depends on why it is zero-rated. An export, a reverse charge inside the construction sector, and an exempt supply are three different accounts, and which one applies is a fact about the sale that only the company making it can state.

So a zero-rated line with no account code of its own is booked to the standard sales account and a warning is raised naming the line, rather than being guessed at quietly. That is the right trade: a warning you can act on beats a plausible number you will not question.

Overriding the defaults

Three places, in order of precedence:

1. The account code on the invoice line. Always wins.
2. The account code on the article the line was copied from, which is how the line gets its code in the first place.
3. The BAS default for the rate the line carries.

A company that has moved its sales to 3011 sets it on the articles and every new line carries it.

The important part is when the code is decided. It is pinned onto the line when the line is written, not looked up from the article when the file is exported. Reading the catalogue as it stands today to decide where an invoice issued months ago posts means that editing an article moves the accounts of documents already exported — and the same month exported twice gives two different files. Pinning means it does not.

An article register that produces the right lines

For a service company the register is small and the types matter more than the names. An article of type hour produces a labour line; service produces a service line; fee produces a fee line; anything else is goods. Labour and service lines can carry a ROT or RUT deduction if they are also flagged eligible. Goods, travel and fees cannot, whatever anybody ticks.

So the fastest way to get the books right is to get the article types right once, at import, rather than to correct line types on four hundred invoices.

An article also carries its VAT rate and its account code, and copying an article onto a line copies the values, never the reference. A price list edited next spring must not rewrite last autumn.

What this module is not

It is not bookkeeping. There is no general ledger, no voucher series outside sales, no year-end close, no annual report and no VAT return to Skatteverket.

What it does is hand your accountant a clean SIE4 file instead of a stack of PDFs to retype. That usually lowers the fee. It does not remove it, and anyone saying otherwise is selling.

SIE export sits in the Väx and Pro tiers. The Start tier does customers, articles, invoices, VAT, PDF and email, and credit notes, with a limit of 50 invoices a month.

Further reading

• The SIE4 file your accountant opens
• How ROT is actually calculated, line by line
• Guide: bookkeeping and SIE