Day to day
Recording invoices
Everything downstream comes from here. An invoice recorded once becomes an RCT filing, a payment and a line in your job costs.
Recording one
On Invoices, record the subcontractor, the invoice number and date, the amount, and the project it belongs to. Assigning a project is optional but it is what makes cost reporting worth looking at — unassigned invoices still count towards your totals, they just group together under “Unassigned”.
If the invoice shows a bank account, record it in the field provided rather than editing the subcontractor. Brickie compares it against the account held on the subcontractor record and tells you if they differ. It never uses the invoice’s account to pay — see Subcontractors and bank details.
VAT treatment
Construction services within RCT scope are reverse-charged: the subcontractor charges no VAT and you self-account for it, normally at 13.5%. Suppliers charge VAT normally.
The difference matters for costing. VAT you can reclaim is not a cost to the business — it passes through it. Counting it would overstate every project by up to 23%, which is the sort of error that makes a job look unprofitable when it is not.
What Brickie flags
Flags are notes on the record, not blocks. They mark things worth a second look before you file or pay.
| Flag | Why it matters |
|---|---|
| VAT on a subcontractor invoice | Work within RCT scope should be reverse-charged. Either the work is outside scope, or the invoice is wrong. Paying VAT that should not have been charged means paying it twice. |
| Bank details differ from the subcontractor record | The most important one. Payment is blocked until it is resolved through the change process, not by editing the invoice. |
| No tax reference for the subcontractor | Revenue will authorise at 35% because it has nobody to look up. |
| Duplicate invoice number for the subcontractor | Usually a re-sent invoice rather than a second one. Paying both is a real risk and hard to recover. |
Invoice statuses
- Draft — recorded, not yet approved for payment. It still counts as a cost: the work was done and the obligation exists, whether or not you have approved paying it.
- Approved — cleared for payment internally. This is an internal control, and is separate from Revenue authorising anything.
- Notified — a payment notification has been filed and Revenue has authorised a deduction against it.
- Void — cancelled. The only status excluded from cost totals.
Approval is not authorisation
Approving an invoice means your office is happy to pay it. Authorising a deduction is Revenue’s decision about how much of it may be paid to the subcontractor. An approved invoice with no Deduction Authorisation still cannot be paid.
Amounts and rounding
Amounts are held to the cent, exactly. Nothing is stored as a decimal that can drift — a figure filed to Revenue and the figure in your records have to be identical, and a one-cent disagreement looks like a bug in your books rather than a rounding artefact.
Deduction amounts come back from Revenue rather than being worked out locally. Brickie re-checks the arithmetic and flags any disagreement rather than quietly preferring its own answer. If Revenue and Brickie disagree about a deduction, you want to know.