The scenario we all know
You buy an €80 domain name for a client. You pay €145 for a train trip to visit them. You take a €45/month Figma subscription because they asked you to produce mockups for their team.
Three months later, you forget half of it, and you just bill your day rate. You just lost €350 your client was perfectly OK to reimburse.
The rebilling principle
A rebilling is the opposite of a classic professional expense:
- Classic pro expense: you pay X, it's a deductible cost. Done.
- Rebilling: you advance X on the client's behalf, you bill them X (or X + margin), and they bear the actual cost.
The challenge: keep the trail of each line, prove the purchase (supplier invoice), align it with your issued invoice to the client.
The three types of rebilling
1. One-off purchases (equipment, travel)
The most common case. You buy something for the client, you rebill at cost (or with a 10-15% margin to cover your management time).
Example: 2 Paris-Lyon train tickets = €290. You rebill €290 HT (+VAT if applicable).
2. Recurring subscriptions (client SaaS)
Trickier. You pay a €45/month subscription during the mission. Question: do you rebill each month or lump-sum at the end?
Practical rule: as long as the mission lasts, rebill monthly (your client prefers to spread it). At end of mission, if the subscription becomes useless, you cancel and any remaining gap is billed in one lump.
3. Subcontracted services (designer, dev, translator)
The trickiest case. If you subcontract 3 days to a freelancer for €1,500, you rebill the client with a margin (your role = project management + quality risk). Usual margin: 20-30% over cost.
The trap of "borderline" expenses
Trick question: you grab an €18 Uber to visit the client. Do you rebill?
Honest answer: no. It's included in your day rate. The rule that works: rebill what exceeds your normal operating mode. An occasional Uber = normal mode. A Paris-Berlin round-trip = not normal mode.
Otherwise you spend your life counting €18s and your client feels nickel-and-dimed.
How to stop forgetting lines
The system that works:
- At purchase time, immediately create a "rebilling" entry tied to the relevant client and mission.
- Each month-end, export the list of in-progress rebillings for this client.
- At invoicing, list every line in the issued invoice (not an aggregate amount — your client wants the detail).
- At payment, mark the rebilling as "matched" with the issued invoice.
Without this system: you forget. With it: zero line falls through.
The tax question (France)
Rebillings are subject to VAT if you are (VAT applies to rebilling like to the main service). And they count in your revenue — so be careful if you're a Micro-Entrepreneur near the cap.
Quick calc: if you rebill €8,000 of train tickets this year, those €8,000 count in your €77,700 Micro cap. You can hit the franchise cap faster than expected.
The tool that changes the game
Freelance Budget tracks rebillings as a separate category (RebillingEntry per month), linked to a client and optionally to a source expense. You see continuously what you need to rebill, and the engine knows these lines will arrive as cash in X days based on the client's payment terms.
Result: no more "damn, I forgot to bill the domain".