The article was written in collaboration with Freelance Online Accounting and Charging-point
There are a variety of public charging stations at the gas stations or in central areas throughout the cities, serving owners of electric vehicles without a charging station at home.
The existing charging stations work great and are very reliable, but there is one problem that is still not 100% resolved.
The issue of issuing tax-recognized invoices for the charging expenses of the electric vehicle is still problematic.
Many business owners find it difficult to measure and justify the charging costs of their employees and how to calculate the expense for charging a business vehicle provided to an employee.
Sometimes even at public charging stations, the customer does not receive an invoice for the cost of charging.
For private customers it is not critical, but when it comes to business customers, the issue of invoices is not a trivial matter.
Therefore, there will soon be a request to settle the matter with the income tax pre rolling for issuing a green invoice to a business or private customer who charges a car at a public charging station.
Transferring company fleets to electric vehiclesThe electric vehicle is quiet, environmentally friendly and most importantly economical.
That's why quite a few companies that own gasoline or diesel vehicles for work are looking into the possibility of making their vehicle fleet electric.
The transfer of the company's vehicles to electric drive can save its owners tens and hundreds of thousands of shekels each month, solely from the differences between fueling costs and charging costs.
But this is where the problem arises, as soon as the company employee changes his compact car to an electric one, there is a need to install a charging station at his home.
But if until now the employees had gasoline or diesel vehicles, then they could keep track of the amounts of fuel and travel costs with the help of the familiar fuel that is able to generate one green invoice for all monthly costs.
The vehicles are refueled at the gas stations and an orderly invoice is submitted at the end of each period to the owners of the company.
There are 2 main difficulties in connecting a charging station at the company employee's home:
- Tracking the consumption of the charging station - when the company employee installs a station in his home, the initial cost is given to him in the invoice and there is no problem here at all. Then every month the charging goes into the monthly electricity bill of his private home, and this is a problem for both parties, the employee has an expense and the employer does not have an invoice.Therefore, the first thing that needs to be done is to monitor the consumption of the charging station in particular and to understand how many kilowatts the station consumes in relation to the total electricity bill, and this is not a simple monitoring at all, and how exactly the business will be offset in tax without an invoice. In addition, the marginal matter of fear of unnecessary use of the aforementioned position should be added, so that the business owners are also afraid that they will take advantage of the actual use and will not be issued with an invoice, the fact that the position will be used to charge vehicles other than the company vehicle can be overcome by a vehicle code and password.
- Issuing invoices to the tax authorities - as you know, the company owner needs to produce invoices so that the employee's electricity expenses are tax recognized. There are systems that try to bring a solution to this issue, but they do not work properly, of course the charging costs in relation to the gasoline costs are tens of percent cheaper. But still the need to issue the invoice from the charging costs is necessary.
The obvious solution: An advanced clearing system capable of issuing invoices and saving the charging history.
The CEO of ifreelance company Eitan Tzdaka announces that soon there will be an easy solution and the production of a green invoice for anyone who wants it, his company deals with clearing solutions and has had approved software for green invoices for over a decade, according to him it is in the final stage of developing an advanced management system for charging stations.
Basically, their system will know how to interface with home and public charging stations, so that in the initial stage the system will produce a green invoice by a system recognized by the income tax according to the electricity consumption of the charging station and send it to the employer with the details of the charging vehicle.
With the help of this development, the apprehension of company and fleet owners to purchase electric vehicles will decrease and reduce the exposure to electric vehicles.
In the systems that exist today, the positions know how to issue invoices but not to oblige the company owner who wishes to receive the invoice for an expense.
What actually happens is that the company employee pays the charging costs on his electricity bill. The employer receives the loading invoice and transfers the payment to that employee, but this has many disadvantages.
The next step in the development of freelance is the ability to charge the charge by the employer and issue a green invoice directly to the employer (interest in development).
In this way, the need to account with the employee for charging costs disappears and the perfect solution is obtained for charging work vehicles at the employee's homes.
How is it designed to work?
Standard home stations do not have the possibility to track charging expenses and especially to issue invoices. The normal home stations are able to charge the vehicle comfortably, but they are great for private consumers and not for large businesses.
The requirement for managing the position and issuing monthly invoices is a managed charging position with OCPP 1.6J communication protocol.
This is an open communication protocol that allows the installation of software within the charging station that is able to control the issuing of invoices and the manner of charging while saving the charging history in the cloud.
For this purpose, the freelance company created a collaboration with the charging-point company. Home charging stations are certified according to the standards in Israel. The company specializes in the import and supply of home charging stations.
The Charging Point company will produce stations with the OCPP 1.6J communication protocol that have all the standards and requirements for installing the software at the charging stations.
This is not the first collaboration between the two companies, a year and a half ago they created a collaboration that provides clearing solutions at fast public charging stations.
The partnership between the two has already been tested as a pilot in Rosh Ha'Ain, after Charging-point has already produced the positions according to all the requirements. If the pilot is successful, the service will go on mass marketing in about two months.
Much more than invoices and settlement!
Besides solving the invoicing problem of most large companies, these software and positions can be useful in a number of other ways. The first of them is credit clearance in business. We are all familiar with the fast public charging stations found at gas stations and in central areas.
These stations are able to charge the vehicle quickly by paying with a credit card or through a dedicated application. The point is that in order to install fast charging stations, a large and industrial electrical panel is needed.
There are small business owners whose electrical panel is not large and industrial, but they want to install a charging station with clearance capability to serve their customers or passers-by.
The Charging-point positions and the aforementioned software can provide scanning capabilities even for standard home positions that do not require a very high voltage connection.
Which means you can turn a regular home position into a clearing position that brings in side income, while turning long passers into paying customers.
This type of solution is able to expose the business owner to new customers who come to charge their car. Normal charging stations charge your vehicle more slowly than fast charging stations.
Thus, those who connect to the charging station have to wait about an hour. A time when he can be exposed to the businesses surrounding the position.
What will the charging stations of the future look like?
As we mentioned above, the private consumer has no benefit in clearing or issuing invoices.
But clearing and issuing invoices are the only way for business owners to switch to electric vehicles without harming the benefits they deserve.
According to Freelance and Charging Point, the future positions should be advanced and provide the ability to clear and issue green invoices online for both private and business customers.
The ambition is to provide the business customer with a centralized monthly invoice with all the charging data of his employees, together with a comprehensive management software that allows data to be presented from an overview as well as in an individual form. This news will bring joy to many business owners who are afraid of switching to electric vehicles.
We will continue and update later on how the various developments will develop in the very near future.