Invoices & payments

Invoices bill your client — standalone, from an order's full lines, or per shipment — and track what's been paid.

Billing a project's time and expenses

An invoice on a project can be filled from what the project has already recorded: Bill time puts the unbilled billable hours on as Labour lines, one per day worked by default, and the project's unbilled expenses go on at what they cost plus their markup. Both stamp the line they went out on, so neither can go out twice — which is also why invoiced time cannot be edited or deleted underneath the invoice.

Creating an invoice

Like quotes and orders: client, line items (each with an optional line discount), Bill to / Ship to, an optional document discount taken off the subtotal before tax, per-line tax, tax rate, optional shipping charge, terms, public and internal notes, plus a due date.

The due date fills itself in from the terms. Pick Net 30 and the due date becomes 30 days out; if that lands on a Saturday or Sunday it moves to the following Monday. Picking a client sets their default terms, and the date follows. It is an ordinary date box — change it whenever the deal is different.

The invoice number is yours to set. Leave it blank and it comes from your configured format (default INV-000001); type your own and that is what the invoice carries. You can also rename an existing invoice — including one raised automatically from an order — as long as the new number is not already in use. Renames are recorded in the invoice's history.

An optional Customer PO records the client's own purchase-order reference (up to 100 characters); invoicing an order copies the order's PO across. It prints on the invoice, on the emailed PDF and on the client's share link, is searchable from the invoices list, and is available there as an optional Customer PO column.

An invoice may have no line items — as long as it still comes to more than zero. Freight or tax billed on its own is a real invoice, so a document with a shipping charge and no lines saves normally. Only something that comes to nothing with nothing on it is refused. Invoicing an order that has no lines asks you to confirm first, then goes ahead.

The invoice page

The number, the status, the action buttons and the Issued / Due / Balance due cards sit at the top, whatever you are doing. Everything else is on tabs: Details (the lines and totals, recording a payment, the card on file, credits and write-offs, the payments already taken, and the addresses and notes), Sharing (the public link, the reminders and the covering email), and Messages, Attachments and History, each with a count where there is something to count.

The tab is part of the address, so an invoice open on its payments can be bookmarked or sent to somebody as it stands. Only the tab you are looking at is loaded, which is why a long invoice opens quickly.

Statuses & payments

Draft → Sent, then the payment states take over automatically:

• Record payment logs an amount with a method (cash, check, bank transfer, card, bank debit, marketplace or other), an optional note for the detail ("cheque no. 118"), a reference, a date and notes. Every payment carries its own receipt number — automatic from your configured format (default PMT-000001) unless you type one.
• Clients can also pay the invoice themselves from its share link, by card or US bank account — see Getting paid online. Those payments arrive on their own, marked Online, showing the processor's fee and the amount that reached your bank.
• The invoice derives Partially paid or Paid from its payments and always shows the balance due; removing a payment recalculates.
• A settled invoice records the paid date — the date of the payment that cleared the balance. It shows on the invoice in place of the balance due, is an optional Paid date column on the invoices list (sortable, and in the CSV export), and clears again if a refund reopens the invoice.
• Refund (owners and admins) gives money back — through the processor on an online payment, or as a plain record on a manual one. A refund is netted out rather than deleting the payment, so a Paid invoice reopens as Partially paid. Only a manually recorded payment can be removed outright.
• Void cancels an invoice permanently (a paid or void invoice can no longer be edited). Where time, expenses or material from a project were billed onto it, voiding asks whether to release the work back to unbilled — ticked by default, because a void is usually undoing a mistake and the work is still waiting to be charged to somebody.
• A Status picker under the buttons sets any status by hand. Partially paid and Paid normally follow the payments you record, so choosing one — or moving off one — asks you to confirm first, warns that recording a payment later can move it again, and logs the override in the history.
• Delete is always available, paid and void invoices included, behind a confirmation. Nothing is refunded by deleting — record the refund first if money actually moved.

The dashboard tracks upcoming and past-due invoices, and each client's page totals invoiced / paid / outstanding.

What settles an invoice

Four things, and the balance is the total less all of them:

1. Payments allocated to it. One payment can settle several invoices — see credit notes and payments across invoices — so what settles this invoice is its share, and a refund on a split payment reduces every invoice it settled in proportion to what each took.
2. Deposits — a payment taken before the invoice existed and put against it later. Mechanically an allocation like any other.
3. Credit applied from a credit note. An invoice cleared entirely by credit is Paid: the client owes nothing.
4. What was written off as a bad debt.

Correcting and writing off

Issue credit on an invoice opens the line picker: what is being credited, how much of each, and whether the goods are coming back. The invoice stands; the credit note says what is being given back. See Credit notes.

Write off records the balance as a bad debt — you do owe this, and we are not going to get it. The invoice shows as Written off, the sale and its revenue stay exactly as they are, and the amount is reported as a bad-debt expense rather than as a reduction in what you sold. Owners and admins only, and reversible if the money turns up.

Void is neither of those: it says the invoice never should have existed. Once anybody has paid it, filed it or reported on it, use one of the two above instead.

Voiding an invoice that carries billed project work asks one question first: release the work back to unbilled? Ticked, the hours, expenses and material stamped to its lines go back to Ready to bill on the project and can be charged onto a new invoice. Unticked, they stay billed to the void invoice — the right answer when the client really was charged and a credit note is the correction. Either way the history says which you chose, and how much moved.

Editing an invoice you have already sent is allowed — a typo in a line is not worth a credit note — but it is not silent. The edit page says the invoice has been sent, saving changes the copy the client opens from their link (a PDF they downloaded earlier will no longer match), and the invoice's history records the save as changed after it was sent with exactly what changed. For a change to what is owed, issue credit instead and the original stands.

Receipts for payments

Every payment can be printed or emailed as a receipt of its own — not another copy of the invoice, but a note of what was paid, what it settled and what is still owed. A client who pays a third of a large invoice and wants that acknowledged on paper is asking for this.

Print receipt and Email receipt sit on every payment, both in an invoice's Payments section and on the payments list. The receipt prints on A4/Letter or on an 80 mm till roll.

The payments section

Payments in the left-hand menu is every payment in the workspace, in one list — so money coming in can be found without opening documents one at a time. Filter it by method, source (recorded, online or imported), client and paid-date range; search it by receipt number, reference, note, invoice number or client name. It has the same shaped columns, saved views and CSV export as every other list.

Record payment there does what the button on an invoice does, except that you pick the invoice on the form: the list offers every invoice with a balance left, and choosing one pre-fills the amount with what it still owes. The payment, the receipt number, the trail entry and the client's receipt email are identical either way; you land back on the invoice it settled.

Four kinds of invoice

Most invoices are standard — goods delivered, money owed. Three others come out of a project that is paid in stages:

• a deposit invoice, raised the moment a quote asking for one is accepted;
• a progress invoice, one stage of a payment schedule;
• a final invoice, which bills the whole contract and deducts everything already paid on it as its own negative lines, so the printed document shows the arithmetic rather than a smaller number you are asked to trust.

The deduction is never taxed again — the tax went out with the deposit — and a deposit invoice plus its final invoice add up to the project exactly once, so your revenue figures are right whichever document you look at. See Deposits, instalments and final invoices.

Billing the same thing every month

A retainer, a maintenance contract, a subscription to a monthly box: set it up once under Invoices → Recurring and it bills itself, optionally taking the money off a card the client has left on file. Make recurring on an invoice starts one from what you have already written. See Recurring invoices, cards on file and late fees.

Overdue, and chasing it

An issued invoice that is unsettled and past its due date becomes Overdue on the nightly pass — a status worked out from the date in your workspace's timezone, not one you set. The invoices list has an Overdue filter and an Age column badging how late each one is; Reports → AR ageing is the same money laid out per client, bucketed current / 1–30 / 31–60 / 61–90 / 90+. Push a due date out and the invoice goes back to Sent; record a payment and it moves on as usual.

Payment reminders chase it for you, on the schedule in Company Settings → Reminders: by default three days before it falls due, on the day, then three, seven and fourteen days after. The Payment reminders card under Sharing on each invoice shows when the next one goes, everything already sent, a Pause switch for this one invoice and a Send now button. See Reminders, follow-ups and status emails.

Late fees

With late fees switched on (Company Settings → Sales defaults), an invoice past due by more than the grace period picks up a fee as a line on itself — untaxed, at most once every thirty days, never past the cap you set, and never on a client marked exempt. The client is emailed when one is added. See Late fees.

A project that grew

Extra work agreed after the fact goes onto the order as its own line, so Close the project out bills it with everything else and the client reads one document rather than two. What the project was originally quoted at stays readable next to it: the project's contract figure is the accepted quote's total. See Projects, time and costs.

Opening balances

Invoices → Add unpaid historical invoice records a debt that predates this workspace: a client, an amount and two dates. No lines — nobody is going to retype six months of them, and the only thing that matters is that the debt ages properly and can take a payment.

It is a real invoice in every way that counts. It arrives as Sent (the client already has it), it ages on the debtors report, it chases like any other invoice and it takes payments normally. Two things are deliberately different:

• It never counts against the free 50 invoices. Typing in last quarter's debts is not trading through OrderDen.
• It is left out of your revenue figures — the profit-and-loss statement, the tax report and the credit rate all skip it. The sale happened somewhere else, and counting it would inflate your first period's turnover by the whole of your old ledger.

Lines cannot be added to one afterwards: that would turn a carried-in debt into a sale you made here. If the amount is wrong, void it and enter a new one.

The client page shows what somebody owed you from before separately from what they owe on invoices raised here, because "$4,200 outstanding" means something different when $3,000 of it is inherited.

Stock has an opening balance too — see opening stock.

What a finished invoice prints

Under the total, every printed, emailed and shared invoice shows what has arrived and what is left: Paid (when anything has been), Credit applied and Written off (when they apply) and always Balance due — so a customer holding a part-paid invoice is never chased for money they already sent. Once nothing is left to pay, the invoice carries a PAID mark under the totals: an outlined word, not a watermark, so it reads on a monochrome print without greying the figures.

An invoice also prints its own terms and conditions after the lines, copied from Company Settings → Documents → Signatures and terms → Invoice terms as the invoice is raised (blank there prints the quote terms). It is a snapshot: changing the setting later never rewrites an invoice already sent. Set it per invoice on the API with termsText. The invoice footer can differ from the quote footer too — see Documents & sharing.

Sending & sharing

Print a themed document, Email it with a PDF attached — no recipient is filled in for you, and every contact on the client plus every member of your workspace is one click to add — or create a share link — the client sees the invoice, its balance due and your payment instructions (set in Company Settings → Documents) without an account. With a payment account connected they can also pay it there and then; see Getting paid online.

Every edit, payment and send is recorded on the invoice's History tab with the team member's name — an emailed invoice records who it went to, the subject and which mail server carried it. See Activity & history.