New Account, Old Credit Note: ZEIT.IO Now Asks
Robert Reiz | 09. September 2026 | 04:15 UTC Sooner or later almost every freelancer goes through it. You switch banks, you open a separate business account, or your old bank restructures the one you have. So you add the new bank details in ZEIT.IO, see them appear in the list — and assume that from now on everything lands on the new account.
It does not. The next credit note still carries the IBAN of the old account. And that usually only surfaces when the money fails to arrive or the client asks about it.
From now on, ZEIT.IO asks. When you add new bank details, or mark existing ones as your default, and your active contracts still point at a different account, you land on an interim page: an overview of every affected contract and the question of whether the new bank details should be adopted.
Why the credit note takes the old account in the first place
This is not a bug, it is by design — and it is the reason the problem is so easy to miss. It is worth a short look at what a credit note in ZEIT.IO is actually assembled from.
Two data sources, no form to fill in
A credit note in ZEIT.IO is never typed up by hand. It always comes from two sources at once:
1. An approved document — either a timesheet or an expense submission. Both are billing periods that have been through the approval process. Only a genuinely approved document ever becomes a credit note; an open or rejected one produces nothing. Everything quantitative comes from here: the recorded hours or days with their line items and rates, or the individual expense receipts, plus the project, the client, the service period and the delivery date.
2. The settings of the associated supplier contract. The document says what is being billed — the contract says on what terms. From it, the credit note inherits, among other things:
| From the contract | Effect on the credit note |
|---|---|
| Bank details | Recipient bank, IBAN and BIC on the credit note |
| Currency | Currency of the entire billing |
| Payment target | Due date |
| Skonto tiers | Early payment discount deadlines and rates |
| Small business regulation | Whether VAT is shown |
| Dynamic fields | Additional entries such as purchase order numbers |
Together, the two sources produce the finished credit note. And that is exactly why the bank details sit where they sit: not on your account, but on the individual contract.
Every contract can point at a different account
That is not a detour, it is the whole point. Each supplier contract references its own bank details from your account. Anyone working for several clients may want the fee from one project to arrive on a different account than the fee from the next — because one client pays in a foreign currency, because a framework agreement specifies a particular IBAN, or because one engagement is meant to stay separate in the books.
ZEIT.IO determines the recipient account in this order — the first rule that applies wins:
- If the contract runs through a supplier organisation, that organisation's bank details apply. Your private accounts play no part.
- Otherwise: if the contract has its own bank details assigned, those win.
- Only if neither applies do the default bank details of your account take effect.
Rule 2 is the normal case in a freelancer account — and the explanation for the old IBAN. New bank details in your account change nothing about a running contract: the contract keeps its assignment, and the next credit note from the next approved timesheet is generated with exactly that IBAN. Even if you closed the old account long ago.
And rule 3 explains why changing your default bank details also deserves a prompt: it only affects contracts that have no assignment of their own.
When adding new bank details there has always been a checkbox for this — "Adopt these bank details for all active contracts". Anyone who overlooks it, or deliberately leaves it empty because they only want to store the account for now, received no further hint afterwards.
The new prompt
This is exactly where the change kicks in. After saving, ZEIT.IO checks your active contracts. If at least one of them points at different bank details, you get a page of its own instead of the overview list.
At the top is the confirmation that the bank details were saved — nothing changes about that, the account is stored either way. Below it, the explanation of why that is not the end of it: that future credit notes are generated with the bank details assigned to the respective contract, and that the new ones are not assigned to any contract yet.
And then, instead of an abstract warning, the concrete numbers — a table of your active contracts:
| Column | What it shows |
|---|---|
| Title | The contract title, linked to the contract |
| Company | The client |
| Period | The contract term, with ∞ for open-ended contracts |
| Assigned bank account | The account this contract bills to today |
That last column is the actual answer to the question you are asking yourself at that moment: which account is currently set where? You no longer have to open every contract one by one.
Below the table, the question and two buttons: Yes and No.
Also when the default bank details change
The second case is subtler and used to be even less noticeable. You already have several sets of bank details stored, you edit one of them, and while doing so you tick "Use these bank details by default".
With that you have changed the default bank details of your account — a change that feels as though it should take effect everywhere. But here too, your running contracts keep their existing assignment.
This case now leads to the same page, with the same table and the same question. The only difference is the introductory text, which refers to the newly set default bank details.
What "Yes" does — and what "No" does
Yes assigns the new bank details to every active contract listed. From the next credit note onwards, those contracts bill to the new account. Ended and terminated contracts are left untouched — there, the historical assignment is part of the document trail and should not change retroactively.
Every single one of those changes is written to the audit log of the respective contract, in plain text and with a timestamp, including the old and the new bank details. Should the question ever come up later as to why a credit note was issued to a particular account, the answer sits on the contract.
No changes nothing. The bank details stay stored in your account, the contracts keep their previous assignment, and you end up back in the overview. That is the right route if you only want to store the new account for now — or if you would rather do the assignment contract by contract, because not every client should pay into the same account.
There is deliberately no third option here and no automatic decision. Where your fee ends up is not a question software should quietly answer for you in the background.
Two details on the side
Contracts with no bank details at all. That is rule 3 from above: contracts that have been following the default bank details of your account. When you add new bank details, ZEIT.IO still fills that gap automatically with the new account, making the assignment explicit. Those contracts therefore never appear on the prompt page — there is nothing left to decide.
When everything already fits. The page only appears when there is genuinely something to do. If you ticked the checkbox while adding, if there are no active contracts, or if all of them already point at the new account, you go straight back to the overview as usual. No extra click is added where there is nothing to clarify.
Where to find it
You will find your bank details in your freelancer account under Settings → Bank details. The prompt appears by itself as soon as it becomes relevant — there is nothing to set up.
One note: the prompt only appears on a change — that is, when bank details are newly added or become the default for the first time. Saving bank details that are already the default again does not trigger it. Which account is attached to which contract can otherwise be seen, as always, on the contract itself.
Questions about assignments or switching accounts? Write to us at support@zeit.io — we are happy to help.