Keeping a Cash Book and Creating Credit Notes: A Freelancer's Guide

A cash book is a record of all the physical cash moving through your business: what comes in, what goes out, and a running balance. Traditionally it was a required part of the books for anyone who handled cash, from market vendors to hairdressers.

The question is whether a modern freelancer still needs one. The answer depends on how much actual cash flows through your business:

• Do you work almost exclusively with bank transfers, iDEAL, or card payments? Then you don't really need a separate cash book. Your bank statements and invoices together already form a complete record, and a standalone cash book adds little on top of that.
• Do you regularly receive cash? Think of sales at a market, in a shop, at events, or in hospitality. In that case a cash book is still relevant, and the tax authorities expect you to record cash receipts and payments precisely, including cash counts.

In short, writing off the cash book entirely goes too far. For service-based freelancers who invoice everything and route it through the bank, a cash book is often just extra admin on top of your regular bookkeeping. For anyone who still handles cash regularly, it remains a necessary part of accurate bookkeeping.

If you do handle cash, a simple Excel template is a solid starting point. A basic cash book example uses five columns:

Date	Description	In	Out	Balance
01-07	Opening cash balance			€150.00
03-07	Market stall sales	€84.50		€234.50
05-07	Packaging materials purchased		€22.30	€212.20
08-07	Cash tip/extra sale	€15.00		€227.20

You calculate the balance by taking the previous balance, adding the 'in' column, and subtracting the 'out' column for every row. As simple as that sounds, it's just as easy to get wrong in practice:

• Calculation errors: one mistyped amount or a broken formula and the balance no longer adds up, which you often only notice once you do a cash count.
• No real archive: an Excel file on your laptop isn't a backup. If the file gets corrupted or lost, your records go with it — while tax authorities require you to keep them for seven years.
• No link to your invoices: the cash book sits separately from your sales and purchase invoices. You have to manually check whether cash receipts match the corresponding invoices, which means double work and more room for error.

For a single cash transaction a week, this is easy enough to manage. Once the volume grows, or you want your cash records to line up cleanly with your invoicing and VAT return, tracking everything manually in Excel quickly costs more time than it's worth.

Instead of typing amounts into a cash book or spreadsheet, you can also capture costs and receipts digitally the moment they happen. That's where AI receipt scanning makes the difference.

Here's how it works: you take a photo of a receipt or forward a purchase invoice by email, and the scan automatically reads the supplier, the amount, and the VAT. There's nothing to type in by hand. Those costs are immediately reflected in your bookkeeping and your VAT overview, so you're not left sorting through a pile of receipts at the end of the quarter.

The big advantage over an Excel cash book: every expense is instantly linked to the original document, archived digitally, and immediately part of your broader records — including any cash expenses. See how this works with expense and receipt tracking in slimzaak.

A credit note is a document that fully or partially credits an invoice you've already sent — essentially 'reversing' an amount. You need a credit note for:

• a return: the customer sends a product back and you need to reverse (part of) the invoice amount
• a correction: the original invoice contained a mistake, such as the wrong amount or quantity
• a refund: you're returning money without a physical product coming back, for example when a service is cancelled

Important to know: you're never allowed to simply edit or delete an invoice you've already sent. As soon as an invoice amount needs to be adjusted downward, you're legally required to do it through a credit note that clearly references the original invoice. That way your records stay verifiable and consistent, tax authorities included.

Manually drawing up a credit note for every return is exactly the kind of task where mistakes creep in: the wrong invoice number, an incorrect VAT calculation, or simply forgetting to send it at all. slimzaak takes care of this automatically.

As soon as a return is registered, slimzaak automatically generates a credit note that's directly linked to the original invoice — including the correct invoice number and VAT calculation. You don't have to work out which amount, VAT rate, or invoice it belongs to yourself. You can then view the credit note directly alongside the related invoice in automatic invoicing.

This automation fits neatly with the rest of your bookkeeping: expenses are captured with AI scanning, invoices are generated automatically, and credit notes are linked automatically. That way you build a complete, consistent set of books without a separate cash book, loose Excel sheets, or manual retyping. Curious what else belongs in a complete freelance bookkeeping setup? Read the freelance bookkeeping checklist or start using slimzaak for free via the pricing page.