TL;DR
RUT is fifty per cent of the labour cost including VAT. For a cleaning firm that is a bigger deduction than ROT on a smaller invoice, sent more often, which changes what matters: the arithmetic is easy and the operational details are where the money leaks. Below is a monthly invoice worked to the öre, followed by the parts that only show up when you send four hundred of them a month.
The rule
- The rate is 50 per cent for RUT.
- The base is the eligible labour, including VAT.
- Materials are excluded by line type, not by a tick box.
- The annual ceiling per person is not applied, and cannot be.
A line carries a deduction only if it is both flagged eligible and of a type that counts as labour. An article of type hour becomes a labour line; an article of type service becomes a service line; both count. Goods, travel and fees do not, whatever anybody ticks.
A monthly cleaning invoice, worked
Fictional customer, three lines, all at 25 per cent VAT:
| Line | Type | Qty | Unit price | Net | VAT | Gross |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Home cleaning | service, eligible | 3,5 h | 549,00 | 1 921,50 | 480,38 | 2 401,88 |
| Window cleaning | service, eligible | 2 h | 549,00 | 1 098,00 | 274,50 | 1 372,50 |
| Cleaning products | goods | 1 | 340,00 | 340,00 | 85,00 | 425,00 |
Net: 3 359,50. VAT: 839,88. Before rounding: 4 199,38. Öresavrundning takes off 0,38, so the invoice total is 4 199,00 kr.
Eligible labour gross is 2 401,88 + 1 372,50 = 3 774,38 kr.
3 774,38 × 50 % = 1 887,19 kr
Invoice total 4 199,00
RUT deduction -1 887,19
Customer pays 2 311,81
The customer transfers 2 311,81 kr. 1 887,19 kr is claimed from Skatteverket.
Look at the first line again
3,5 hours at 549,00 is 1 921,50 net. VAT at 25 per cent is 480,375 kronor — half an öre. It rounds to 480,38 when the line is written, once, and that integer is what the rest of the arithmetic uses.
Round at the end instead and the VAT column on the page no longer adds up to the VAT figure underneath it. On one invoice that is an öre. Across a monthly run it is an öre on a great many invoices, all of them sent to people who add up columns.
The 340 kronor that carry nothing
The cleaning products line is the whole point of having line types.
Sweep that 340,00 into the hourly rate — raise the price from 549 to, say, 611 and drop the materials line — and the eligible labour gross rises, and the claim rises with it. The customer is happier, the invoice is simpler, and the claim is wrong. It is wrong by 212,50 kr on this one invoice, every month, for every customer whose rate was built the same way.
Materials are excluded as a category rather than as a setting precisely so that this cannot be done by accident. The line type decides.
Recurring invoices, and the two ways they go wrong
A cleaning firm bills the same customers on the same rhythm, which is what recurring invoices are for, and they have two characteristic failures.
Invoicing forward. A scheduling system writes a job before it is done, because somebody has to drive to it. An invoicing system must write an invoice after the period it covers, because billing a customer in advance for a month that has not happened is a different commercial arrangement and not one anybody agreed to by saving a rule. So generation looks backwards, and the window ends today.
Invoicing twice. An occurrence already written is never written again, and what enforces that is a unique index on the agreement and the occurrence date — not the query that checks first. The query saves a write in the ordinary case; the index is what holds when the nightly run overlaps somebody pressing "generate now". Billing a customer twice is not a bug that can be fixed by editing a row, because the document has left the building.
Two guard rails sit alongside. A single run reaches back at most 31 days, so an agreement backdated to last January produces one period of catching up rather than twelve — an invoice for a month the customer was never told about is a phone call, not a payment. And a single run writes at most 60 invoices for one agreement, because reaching that means somebody typed a daily rule where they meant a monthly one.
Once written, a recurring invoice can stay a draft for somebody to check, or be sent by email automatically; a send that fails leaves the draft with the reason on it and tells everybody who is allowed to send invoices.
What the customer actually pays, and why matching cares
2 311,81 kr, not 4 199,00.
That matters to reconciliation. When the bank statement comes in, an invoice is matched on what is still owed — the total, less the part Skatteverket settles, less what has already arrived. A matcher comparing against the printed total would miss every single RUT invoice where the customer paid exactly the right amount, which is to say most of them. OCR references and bankgiro numbers covers the three tiers and which one is allowed to post without a person looking.
It also matters to reminders. Once 2 311,81 has arrived, nothing is outstanding from the customer, and the reminder policy refuses to chase the invoice at all — the rest is the state's half. Chasing somebody who has paid everything asked of them is the fastest way to lose a monthly contract.
The ceiling, said out loud
The annual ceiling per person is not applied here and cannot be. It depends on what every other company has claimed for that buyer this year, and none of that is visible from this system. So the invoice prints the fact rather than guessing at a cap:
Det årliga takbeloppet per person har inte kontrollerats på den här fakturan. Det beror på vad samtliga utförare begärt för er under året. Om Skatteverket avslår hela eller delar av begäran fakturerar vi mellanskillnaden.
For a cleaning firm this is not academic. A customer on a fortnightly contract is the customer most likely to hit their ceiling in the autumn, and the last sentence is what lets you invoice the difference without an argument.
What is built and what is not
The calculation, the split between labour and materials, the deduction line on the document, the separate receivable in the books, and the record of what was claimed against what was approved are all built. So is the claim file: from paid RUT invoices Closepact builds Skatteverket's import file (schema version 6, validated against Skatteverket's XSD), one per deduction type and payment year, up to 100 buyers each, with Skatteverket's work types, such as Städning, set per invoice or per line. The submission is not done from here — Skatteverket has no API for it, so you import the file in the e-service Rot och rut – företag and sign with BankID. The decision is recorded by hand or read from Skatteverket's decision file, and booked.
The buyer's personal number is entered in the panel on the customer, validated, stored encrypted and shown masked; the full number appears only through a reveal that is written to the audit log. An invoice with a RUT deduction cannot be sent without it, and it is printed on the invoice with the split between labour and materials and the address where the work was done.
ROT and RUT sit in the Väx and Pro tiers of the invoicing module. A document is one or the other, never both — the deduction type is a property of the invoice.