Purchase invoices
Record supplier bills in Arvello: categorise costs, capture deductible input VAT for line 5 of the Estonian KMD return, and track unpaid amounts and due dates.
A purchase invoice is a bill your company receives from a supplier. In Arvello these are recorded as expenses (you'll find them under Expenses in the sidebar), and recording one does three jobs at once: it books the cost into the right category, captures the input VAT you can deduct, and tracks what you still owe and when.
If your company is VAT-registered, this is also where your VAT return is quietly being assembled — every tax code you pick on an expense line determines what lands on the KMD, the monthly VAT return filed with EMTA (the Estonian Tax and Customs Board).
Recording a purchase invoice
Go to Expenses and click New Expense, then pick the supplier. If they're new, you can add them without leaving the form — for Estonian companies, entering the 8-digit registry code looks up and auto-fills the official details. A supplier can have a default expense category, which pre-fills the category on every future bill from them.
Record the supplier's invoice or reference number, the invoice date and the due date — leave the due date blank if the bill is already paid. Invoices in a foreign currency are supported; Arvello shows the EUR equivalent, since your books are kept in euros.
Each line takes a description, the amount excluding VAT, an expense category (an account from your chart of accounts) and a tax code. The Qty field is optional and defaults to 1: for a bill of several identical items, enter the quantity and the line's total amount excluding VAT, and Arvello shows the unit price it works out from the two (marked ≈ when the amount does not divide into whole cents). Arvello calculates the VAT per line from the amount and totals everything up — subtotal, VAT total and total including VAT. For most domestic purchases in 2026 the tax code is the standard rate (24%); see VAT rates & tax codes for the full list.
Drag and drop the invoice or receipt onto the Receipts area — JPG, PNG, HEIC and PDF are accepted. The expenses dashboard keeps a running count of expenses still missing a receipt; see Receipts & documents.
A saved expense starts as a draft you can still edit or delete. Clicking Finalize posts the journal entry and includes the expense in VAT calculations — after that it can no longer be edited, only corrected with a supplier credit note (see below), which is the standard accounting treatment for posted documents.
Input VAT and the KMD
The deductible VAT on your purchases (input VAT) flows to line 5 of the KMD, offsetting the VAT you've charged on sales. Four things worth knowing:
Only finalised expenses count. Draft expenses are excluded from the return, and the KMD checklist warns you when drafts with VAT, or with VAT you account for yourself, are sitting unfinalised.
Reverse-charge purchases are handled for you. For most business services bought from foreign businesses — software, consultancy — and for intra-Community acquisitions of goods, no VAT appears on the supplier's invoice — Arvello self-assesses it, declaring the output VAT and the matching deduction on the same return. The code follows the supplier: Reverse charge, EU supplier for a business in another EU country, Reverse charge, non-EU supplier for one outside the EU, as the KMD reports the two on different lines. A few goods bought from Estonian businesses are reverse-charged too — property the seller has chosen to tax, metal waste, precious metals and certain metal products: the invoice shows the VAT, but you pay the price without it and code the lines Reverse charge, Estonian supplier. The plain reverse-charge codes use the standard rate; for things Estonia taxes at 9%, such as books, pick the code marked self-assessed at 9% — see VAT rates & tax codes.
Foreign VAT is not input VAT. VAT a supplier charged under another country's rules — a German supplier's 19%, for instance — never goes on line 5. A received e-invoice carrying it is booked at the VAT-inclusive amount and flagged Foreign VAT; that VAT can be claimed back through the EU VAT refund application in e-MTA or stays part of the cost. See E-invoices & Peppol.
The supplier is kept as you recorded it. A finalised expense keeps the supplier's details as they were when you finalised it. The KMD INF annex lists it under that supplier's registry code, which is part B, the list of purchases from Estonian businesses. If the supplier was entered wrong, for instance with a mistyped registry code, correct the supplier first. Then open the expense and select Update from supplier on the notice that the supplier's details have changed. Its supplier credit notes are updated with it, and the change is recorded in the activity log. If that month's VAT return is approved but not yet sent, reopen it first. If it was already filed, update the supplier and then amend the return: Arvello marks the filed return as out of date with the books. The expense's credit notes can be in later months' returns, so amend every return Arvello marks. A month whose return you filed outside Arvello has nothing to mark here: amend that KMD in e-MTA. Once the year's annual report is approved, the correction isn't possible.
See Preparing a KMD return for how the full return comes together.
Tracking payment
Each expense carries a status: Draft, Unpaid, Paid, Credited, Reconciled or Cancelled. You don't mark bills paid by hand — when the payment appears in your bank feed, reconcile the transaction against the expense and Arvello records the payment (date, amount, method) and updates the status. See Reconciling transactions. Every payment is listed on the expense's Payments tab and collectively under Supplier Payments. A supplier credit note reduces what is still owed; once one covers the whole invoice the status becomes Credited. The credit note itself never takes a payment, so it is not listed under Unpaid.
Supplier credit notes
When a supplier credits an invoice they have already sent you — returned goods, a price correction, a cancelled part of a service — they issue a credit note (kreeditarve). In Arvello a supplier credit note is recorded against the finalised purchase invoice it credits, so the invoice always shows what is still owed and the input VAT you deducted is reduced by exactly what the supplier reversed.
Go to the finalised purchase invoice and click Record credit note. Arvello creates a draft credit note prefilled with everything still open on the invoice — every line the first time, one line per VAT rate and expense category for what is left after an earlier credit note — at the invoice's own tax codes and rates, and opens it for editing. If a draft already exists it is reopened rather than duplicated; only one draft credit note can exist per invoice.
Type the supplier's credit note number and date, then trim the lines to what was actually credited, as positive amounts excluding VAT. Only the tax codes used on the invoice are offered, and a credit note can never exceed what is left on the invoice — in total, or under any one VAT rate. The supplier, currency and exchange rate follow the invoice and can't be changed.
Finalise credit note posts the reversal to the books — accounts payable goes down, the expense categories and VAT receivable are reduced — and lowers the amount owed on the invoice. Like a finalised expense it can't be edited afterwards.
Credit notes that arrive as e-invoices over Peppol are handled the same way, except that Arvello builds the draft for you — see E-invoices & Peppol.
VAT. The credit note reduces the input VAT on line 5 of the KMD. If your VAT return for the invoice's month has not been submitted yet, the reduction is declared in that month; once that return has been submitted, the credit note is reported in the month it is dated (KMS § 29 lg 7 applies to the buyer as well as the seller). A credit note issued because an invoice went unpaid is not a credit note in this sense — the VAT Act treats non-payment separately.
A credit note is not a payment and is never paid on its own: it changes what the supplier is owed. If the supplier pays money back after crediting an invoice you have already paid, that refund arrives in your bank feed and the credited invoice shows the amount owed back by supplier.
Supplier refunds
When a supplier pays money back — after their credit note on an invoice you had already paid, or because you paid too much — the money shows up in Banking as an incoming transaction. On the reconciliation screen, choose Supplier Refund for that transaction and pick the purchase invoice it refunds: Arvello lists every purchase invoice a supplier owes money back on, with the amount. When exactly one of them is owed back the transaction's amount it is picked for you.
Confirming records the refund on the invoice (it appears on its Payments tab with a Refund badge) and books it against the bank account the money arrived in — the payable to that supplier goes back to zero. A refund can't be more than the invoice is owed back, nor dated before the payment or credit note behind it, and a supplier's refund is never categorised as an expense or as income: the cost was already reversed by the credit note, and booking it again would count it twice. If you undo the match later, the refund is removed from the invoice too. Like client refunds, supplier refunds are for euro invoices only: a foreign-currency purchase invoice can be credited, but its refund cannot be recorded in Arvello yet.
Receiving e-invoices as purchase invoices
If a supplier sends e-invoices over the Peppol network, their invoices arrive in Received E-Invoices and Arvello creates a draft expense from each one automatically — supplier, lines, VAT and all. Each line keeps the supplier's quantity and net amount, and they stay put if you edit the draft. Review it, click Approve & Post, and it joins your books like any other finalised expense. See E-invoices & Peppol.