External employees are freelancers who work for you but are not permanently employed. ZEP distinguishes two models: Freelancer (bills you separately and sends invoices) and Freelancer with credit note (you automatically create a credit note from recorded times and receipts).
Note: The freelancer function belongs to the standard scope of ZEP Compact and ZEP Professional. It is not available in ZEP Clock.
Activate the function
To be able to choose the employment options Freelancer and Freelancer with credit note at all, you activate them once in administration:
Open Administration > Employee settings.
Check the box Enable freelancers and credit notes.
Save the setting.
From now on, the field Employment is available in the employee dialog in the Settings area.
Create external employees
External employees are created like regular employees; the general workflow is described in the article Creating, editing, and deleting employees. In the Settings tab, select either Freelancer or Freelancer with credit note for Employment.
Variant Freelancer
With the employment type Freelancer, the employee records project times in ZEP but bills you independently outside of ZEP. Additionally, in the Settings tab, the field VAT ID appears, which can be used in reports and interfaces.
Variant Freelancer with credit note
With the employment type Freelancer with credit note, ZEP automatically creates a credit note from the recorded times and out-of-pocket receipts. Additionally, a new Credit note settings tab becomes visible in the employee dialog.
In the Credit note settings tab, you maintain:
Currency and tax rate: selected from master data; typically 19 % or 0 % under small-business regulation.
Credit note address: if it differs from the employee contact, e.g. because the freelancer bills via a limited company or sole proprietorship.
Texts above and below: WYSIWYG editors for individual header and footer texts, e.g. for payment notes or small-business clauses.
The exact fields per tab are described in the article Employee data.
Effect in reports
External employees appear in employee reports like all others and can be filtered by employment type. With the employment type Freelancer with credit note, additional credit-note reports are available in the Revenues and Costs module.
View own credit notes
Employees with the employment type Freelancer with credit note see their own credit notes in a dedicated self-service area. They keep the full overview of all credit notes created so far, their status, and can download them as PDF.
Access to own credit notes
You open your credit notes via the personal submenu on the left — the area is called My credit notes. It is only visible if the employment type Freelancer with credit note is maintained in your employee data; otherwise ZEP hides the menu automatically.
Content of the overview
The overview lists all credit notes created so far with:
Credit note number and creation date
Billing period (from to)
Gross amount and tax rate
Status (draft, created, paid)
PDF download of the credit note
You can filter by period or status and sort via the column headers.
Credit note in detail
A click on a credit note opens the detail view with the contained items, the billed project times and receipts. On the detail page you also find the header and footer text that is configured for your credit notes.
You cannot create credit notes yourself
You can only view and download your credit notes, not create or change them yourself. Creating a credit note is an action of the administrator or controller in your company and is typically triggered once per billing period.