The single invoice the school wants from a freelance guide

Identify what is actually being sold, in whose name, and who carries the risk. That is the test Czech trade law uses, and it is not the same as what the contract calls the job.

• (a) One invoice for coach + hostel + meals + tastings + fees. This is not guiding. Assembling services bought from third parties and reselling them in your own name is organising tours, which is a licensed (concession) activity carrying a compulsory insolvency-insurance obligation. If instead you merely resell someone else's ready-made package, you are acting as a travel agent - a separately notifiable trade with disclosure duties towards the client about who the organiser is and what cover that organiser holds. Either way, you cannot do it on a guiding licence.
• (b) Vienna and Bratislava extension. The activity is still guiding, so the licence is not the obstacle - but it is performed abroad. Freedom to provide services does not mean “no local rules”: you must check the destination's requirements for guides and for access to the specific sites before you promise anything, and you cannot take on the organising side of the trip. Reply: I can guide the extension as your contracted guide; the transport, tickets and any local accreditation are yours or the licensed operator's to arrange.
• (c) Selling their booklet on commission, cash. Retail sale is a separate trade and can normally be notified; the problem is mixing someone else's goods and someone else's money into your guiding contract, with no record and no invoice trail.

The reply to send: guiding, yes; organisers' work, no - with the honest options laid out (they buy the package from a licensed operator, or you take the concession and the insurance and price the risk in). Refusing here protects the contract you actually have.

VAT. Because you would be buying in services and reselling them in your own name, the money is not your turnover: the travel-services margin scheme applies. Tax is calculated only on your mark-up, at the standard rate, and it sits inside that mark-up - the pass-through cost of the coach and the hostel is not taxed in your hands. If, by contrast, you invoiced 11 400 EUR as one “guiding service” at 21 % on the full amount, you would be paying tax on money you never earned and could never deduct input tax on the purchased items.

Liability. This is the bigger exposure. The moment the money passes through you and you pay the suppliers, you are the organiser in substance. If the hostel closes, the coach does not arrive or a cellar tasting is cancelled, the school's claim is against you, not against the suppliers. A professional indemnity policy written for guiding will almost certainly exclude tour-operating, so you would be uninsured for exactly the risk you just took on.

Restructure into three documents.

1. Your guiding contract, at a stated daily rate, invoiced to the school.
2. The school contracts and pays the coach, hostel and meals directly - or the Czech agency in the chain does.
3. At most, you act as a disclosed intermediary for a fee, with suppliers named on the itinerary and their confirmations and insurance details in the client's hands.

If the school insists on a single invoice, say plainly that the only correct routes are: they buy from a licensed operator, or you obtain the concession and the insurance and re-price.

Refuse the cash version; the commission itself is negotiable.

Reasons:

• The commission is your taxable income and must appear somewhere. Cash with no record creates an unexplained inflow and an unexplained outflow of the school's money - the worst of both worlds.
• You would be handling third-party funds (their stock, their revenue) inside a contract that says “guiding services”. If a booklet goes missing or a pupil's parent disputes a sale, there is no paper either way.
• The end customers are minors on a school trip; anything that looks like an off-the-books arrangement at a school's expense is a reputational risk far larger than 20 % of a few dozen booklets.
• The booklets are the school's goods. Selling them at 8 EUR with a price printed on them, while you quietly net 1.60 EUR, is exactly the kind of thing that surfaces in a complaint to the agency or the school board.

Compliant alternatives, in order of preference:

1. They ship the booklets to the hostel and the teachers sell them at the reception desk - zero involvement from you.
2. A short written distribution agreement: an agreed number of copies, a record of copies sold, an invoice from you for a distribution fee (not a slice of each sale), payment by transfer.
3. If they only want a recommendation, recommend a specific bookshop and disclose in writing any referral arrangement you have with it.

In the reply, keep the tone commercial, not moralising: “Happy to help move the books - here is how we can do it with clean paperwork so nobody has to explain anything later.”