Professional Invoices for Choirs: WYSIWYG Templates, E-Invoicing and Cashbook in One Tool

Concert tickets, workshop fees, soloist honorariums or advertising contributions from sponsors — in everyday choir life, situations quickly pile up for which the association has to issue a proper invoice. Until now, that was only possible in Chorilo via manual Word templates or external accounting software. With the new invoicing function in the cashbook, you can now create professional invoices directly in Chorilo that visually match your association, contain all the mandatory tax information and, at the push of a button, are available as a legally compliant e-invoice in XRechnung or ZUGFeRD format. You no longer need any additional software for this — neither a classic accounting program nor a cloud service.

The Template Editor: WYSIWYG Instead of Word

The heart of the new function is the visual template editor. Instead of aligning a Word file with tabs or fiddling around in an HTML template, you design your invoice template in a live preview on an A4 sheet: what you see in the editor is what the recipient later sees in the PDF and in the e-invoice document. That is what WYSIWYG means — "what you see is what you get". There are no hidden formattings, no invisible code that later leads to shifts and no cryptic print preview that suddenly looks different from the editing view. You work directly on the final result.

The template consists of individual blocks: a header section with your logo, a recipient address, a block with invoice number and date, the line-item table with your services, a totals block with net, tax and gross amount, and a footer with bank details, tax number and association details. You can place each of these blocks freely on the page — move them by drag and drop, change their size at the handles, adjust the font size, change the alignment. If your association has letterhead with its own background design, you simply upload it as PDF or PNG, and the contents are laid on top of that letterhead — exactly the way a printed master would dictate.

Placeholders That Fill Themselves

So that you do not have to retype every value for every invoice, the editor works with more than forty placeholders. You insert, for example, recipient name, recipient address, invoice number, invoice date, service date, due date, total net amount, VAT or association name into the text block from a side panel — and when you create a concrete invoice, these fields fill in automatically from the master data and the invoice entry. This way you design the template properly once and can then issue any number of invoices with it, without having to work in the layout file every time.

The line items of an invoice have their own column configuration. You decide which columns your table shows — for instance description, quantity, unit, unit price, tax rate and total price — how wide each column is, how it is aligned and in which format the value is displayed (text, currency, percentage or plain number). Anyone billing only simple flat-rate items can hide the quantity column; anyone needing per-piece or per-hour prices leaves it visible. This configuration is part of the template — once set, it applies to all invoices using that template.

Your Own Design: Logo, Fonts, Colours

So that the invoice fits the association as if cast from a single mould, font, font size, accent and primary colour as well as page margins can be set centrally. Upload your logo, choose your association colours, set your house typeface — from that moment these settings run through every invoice you send. Recipients see immediately that the invoice comes from you, and you do not need any design knowledge to get a proper result.

Because many choirs perform internationally or work with suppliers and sponsors in neighbouring countries, templates exist per language. You can store one standard template each in German, English, French, Dutch, Spanish, Italian, Swedish and Slovenian. When you write an invoice to an English-speaking recipient, you simply select the English template — headings like "Invoice", "Subtotal", "VAT" and the date format adjust automatically, the contents from the placeholders fill themselves in the chosen language.

E-Invoicing: ZUGFeRD and XRechnung at the Push of a Button

Since the German Growth Opportunities Act, electronic invoicing has been gradually mandatory in Germany for business transactions between companies — that means no longer just a PDF, but a structured XML file according to the XRechnung standard, or a hybrid ZUGFeRD PDF that contains both a readable page and machine-readable XML at the same time. Choirs that invoice to municipal administrations, cultural offices or other authorities, for example, are directly affected; in B2B transactions the recipient is increasingly entitled to demand an e-invoice.

In Chorilo, you choose the desired format when finalising an invoice — ZUGFeRD is the default, XRechnung is available as an alternative. The application automatically generates a second file with the machine-readable XML record, validates the mandatory fields (name, address, postcode, city, country of the recipient as well as your own association data) and stores the result audit-securely in the object storage. You do not need to know anything about the technical details of the XML schemas — the application handles that completely in the background.

Status Flow: Draft, Final, Credit Note

An invoice always starts as a draft. While in draft, you can add any line items, change addresses, correct amounts — nothing is fixed, no number is used up, no PDF is created. As soon as the invoice is right, you finalise it with one click. At that moment Chorilo assigns the next free invoice number from your association's number range, generates the PDF and the e-invoice XML and archives both. From then on the invoice is, towards the tax office, a real invoice — with a gap-free, sequential number as required by the German GoBD bookkeeping rules.

Corrections by editing are no longer possible after finalisation — that would not be permitted in bookkeeping terms. Instead of touching the original invoice, you issue a credit note that automatically refers to the original invoice with negative amounts. Both documents remain in the system permanently and the history is fully traceable.

Small-Business Rule, Tax Rates and Cent-Precise Amounts

If your association uses the German small-business rule under §19 UStG, Chorilo automatically sets tax rates to zero and adds the required note text, so that you do not accidentally show VAT. If you are subject to standard taxation, you can assign an individual tax rate per line item and the totals are shown correctly grouped by tax rate — that is important when, for example, 7 % on sheet music and 19 % on recordings appear together on an invoice.

Internally, all amounts run through a BCMath pipeline with four decimal places and are only rounded to two places commercially at the very end. That sounds technical but has a practical effect: the sum of your individual line items results in exactly the same cent amount in the PDF, in the XML file and in every later booking analysis — no classic "0.01 difference" problem of the kind that loves to appear in spreadsheets.

Connection to the Cashbook

Because the new function lives directly in the cashbook, you can link a cashbook entry retroactively to an invoice. When a payment arrives on the association's account, you assign this bank or cash entry to the matching invoice — via a selection field in the transaction details. This way every board member and every auditor sees in the document trail which payment settles which invoice. The linking is deliberately manual: you keep control over which payment is booked against which invoice, especially when a customer has several open invoices or a payment bundles several amounts. Already archived PDFs and XML files remain accessible at any time — anyone who wants to export an invoice again as an e-invoice later or download it as a PDF clicks it in the invoice list and loads the archived version.

Permissions and Multi-Person Boards

Who is allowed to see or create invoices is regulated via the existing permission system. cashbook.view allows viewing the list, cashbook.edit opens creating, editing, finalising and cancelling, cashbook.delete allows deleting pure drafts. This way the board can decide whether only the treasurer may issue invoices or whether the secretary may also prepare drafts which the treasurer then only needs to finalise. Sub-ensembles of a main choir work with separate invoice numbers — youth and main choir each get their own gap-free number range.

Who Benefits from the New Function

The benefit is most obvious for choirs that regularly sell concert tickets to business customers, charge for workshops or vocal coaching, invoice sponsor contributions or pass on fees to external soloists. But pure membership-fee associations also benefit when they need a proper invoice for individual members or sponsors — the function is not tied to a billing volume and does not cost any extra licence on top of the subscription. You save the monthly fees of external invoicing tools, keep the document workflow in the same system as members, cashbook and receipt management and at the same time tick off the e-invoice obligation and GoBD-compliant archiving. Anyone already working with the Chorilo cashbook will find the new invoices section directly in the left menu under "Cashbook" — the first own template is designed in five minutes.