3D printing for companies: invoicing, lead times and reorders
How ordering as a company works: VAT invoice, confidentiality, real lead times, repeat orders, and who answers when something goes wrong.
Almost everything written about 3D printing is aimed at somebody printing one part. Ordering as a company raises different questions, and hardly any of them are technical: how the invoice arrives, whether the file is safe, what happens if a part comes out wrong, and whether in six months the order can be repeated exactly.
Invoice and tax details
At checkout there are fields for company and tax ID: fill them in and the invoice is issued to the company, with VAT broken out, ready for your accountant. If you forget, write to us with the order reference and we reissue it. The invoice arrives by email when you order, not when the part ships.
Confidentiality
The files you upload are not shared, not published and not reused for anything. They are kept while needed to produce the order and handle a possible claim, and deleted sooner on request. If your company needs a signed NDA before sending geometry, say so through the contact form: we sign it without argument.
Lead times: what is promised and what is not
- The lead time you see at checkout is in working days and already includes any wait for material that has to be brought in. It is not an optimistic figure that later has things added to it.
- A run of two hundred does not fit in the lead time of one. Machine hours multiply, and paying for rush does not create more printers.
- If you have a fixed date — a trade fair, a client delivery — say it when ordering. We work backwards from it and tell you whether it arrives before you pay.
If something goes wrong
If a part comes out with a printing defect, it gets reprinted. That is on us. If the part comes out exactly like the file and the file had a mistake in it, that is not a printing defect — but tell us anyway, because it is often visible beforehand and we flag it. That is why we ask when a dimension looks critical rather than printing it and invoicing.
And if what you need is not printing — because the part wants machining, or because at your volume a mould serves better — we say so. Losing an order is cheaper than delivering something that does not work.