Website Development in Your Books: Contract, Invoice

Short answer: from the client’s side, website development is four documents: a contract with a scope list, an invoice for payment, an act of services rendered, and — if the contractor is VAT-registered — a tax invoice. Two further questions belong to your accountant: which accounts carry the expense, and whether the site is capitalised as an intangible asset. Your accounting policy gives the final answer, so this article does not invent journal entries. What follows is the part that depends on the client and the contractor: document set, payment stages, activity codes, access. Registry prices: a card at from $699 (₴29,000), Corporate Lite at from $1,325 (₴55,000), support at from $72 (₴3,000)/mo a month.

The documents that should remain after a build

Document	What it is for	Who prepares it	What to check
Contract	basis for payment and for claims	contractor	scope, amount, deadlines, warranty, access
Technical brief or estimate as an annex	exactly what the work includes	jointly	pages, blocks, integrations, languages
Invoice	basis for a bank payment	contractor	details, amount, period, service name
Act of services rendered	proof the work was accepted	contractor, you sign	scope and period, the list of stages
Tax invoice (VAT)	VAT credit	contractor, only if VAT-registered	whether one exists at all: a single-tax contractor issues none
Access handover act	domain, hosting, admin panel, keys	contractor	logins, domain owner, control-panel access

Two documents clients rarely ask for and later regret: the estimate as a contract annex, and the access handover act. The first protects against “that was never included”; the second against having a site that someone else controls.

The contract: what has to be written in it

“Subject: website development” protects nobody. The contract needs lines you can check a result against:

1. List of pages and blocks. How many and which: home, three services, samples, contacts, a form with these fields.
2. Integrations as a separate list. CRM, payments, a bot, an admin panel, a calculator. Anything not listed later counts as extra work.
3. Amount and payment schedule. For example 50/50 on Lite or 30/40/30 on Standard, with stage dates.
4. Deadline and what counts as delivery. A date plus a test: pages reachable, form working, access handed over.
5. Warranty. 30 days, 60 on the corporate Standard and 90 on the Premium: what it covers and how to raise a claim.
6. Rights and access. Who owns the domain, hosting, code and graphics, and when credentials are transferred.
7. Changes. How a service or page gets added and at what price: from $41 (₴1,700)/hr an hour or a fresh estimate.

Staged payment: how it looks in the books

Development is paid in parts, and that affects paperwork more than it affects price.

Scheme	Payments	Acts	What it means for periods
Lite: 50/50	start and delivery	two	the expense splits across two months
Standard: 30/40/30	start, demo, delivery	three	three supporting documents in three periods
Support: monthly	one a month	one a month	a recurring expense, like rent or telecoms

A practical point: a stage act helps both sides. The client sees what was paid for instead of accepting everything at the end; the contractor holds confirmation of a stage, which unlocks the next payment. Without stage acts, six months later you reconstruct what the first payment actually bought.

KVED and DK codes: what reaches the paperwork

Two classifiers get confused, so briefly:

• KVED is the contractor’s activity classification. Websites and programming sit in class 62.01 “Computer programming” under KVED-2010, which covers development, testing and technical support. The code is recorded in the USR register and checked from a company extract by name or by its registration number.
• DK 021:2015 is the procurement subject code. The buyer sets it when purchasing with public funds, taking it from the tender notice, not from private contracts.
• From 1 January 2027 KVED-2010 gives way to the new NACE 2.1-UA classification. Contracts dated 2027 should carry both codes.

For a private buyer, the contractor’s KVED is a question of diligence, not validity: a missing class does not void a contract, but large companies and tender departments sometimes require the codes to match. The full breakdown with official sources is in the article on DK and KVED for website development and maintenance.

Journal entries: why we do not name an account pair

“Which Dr and Cr for website development” has two answers, and both are legitimate:

1. Period expense. The service is recorded in the act and goes to expenses in the month the stage closed. This is the common treatment: a site is a service, not a separate asset.
2. Intangible asset. If the spend meets your accounting policy’s capitalisation criteria, the site can be put on the balance sheet and amortised. That is a different answer to the same transaction.

Decide which one with your accountant before the first payment, so documents do not have to be moved between periods later. VAT works the same way: whether the contractor is registered and whether the amount enters a VAT credit depends on their tax system and your status. A sole proprietor on the single tax keeps no accounting ledger at all: there is a Revenue Book, and the journal-entry question does not apply.

Support, domain and hosting: recurring costs every year

After delivery, regular payments appear, and they are planned in advance because they repeat.

Item	Frequency	Registry guide	Supporting document
Technical support	monthly	from $72 (₴3,000)/mo	invoice and act for the month
Work outside the plan	as needed	from $41 (₴1,700)/hr an hour	act listing the tasks
Speed and technical fixes	one-off	from $241 (₴10,000)	contract or an order inside the plan
Hosting and domain	yearly or monthly	provider’s invoice	invoice and payment confirmation
Live chat	monthly	from $9 (₴390)/mo	service invoice

Register hosting and the domain under your own organisation even when the contractor configures them. That is cheaper than recovering access a year later, and it removes the risk of the domain sitting on someone else’s details.

Prepayment and refunds: how to protect yourself

• Prepayment is normal when the contract defines a stage and a test. The payment ties to the start of work or to the demo, not to an abstract “kick-off”.
• Describe the refund before anyone pays. What happens if the client stops after a stage: how much is retained, what is handed over (mockups, access, part of the code).
• A warranty means free defect fixing. Changes outside the tier are billed separately: that is honest in both directions.
• Claims go in writing, with dates. “The speed is unsatisfactory” without a measurement leads nowhere; a PageSpeed screenshot and a list of pages get actioned.

Questions owners and accountants ask

Need figures for an estimate: build them in the brief builder, where the amount, scope and timeline come from the registry and then move into the contract. Services with prices are laid out on the pricing page, and how to keep access and rankings when the contractor changes is covered in the site maintenance guide.