Invoicing & Getting Paid

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1Create an invoice

You don’t strictly need a saved contact to invoice someone — typing a customer name is enough to save a draft. But picking a real customer from Contacts (anyone marked Customer or Both) pulls in their email automatically, which you’ll need later to email the invoice, and keeps their invoice history in one place.

Tax is calculated automatically as a flat 10% of the subtotal (after discount) — there’s no per-line tax rate and no separate tax setup to configure. Grand Total is subtotal minus discount plus that 10%.

2Send & approve it

Moving an invoice from Draft to Sent (or straight to Paid/Overdue) is the moment revenue actually gets recorded — but whether that happens immediately depends on who’s doing it.

An administrator or finance manager can move an invoice straight to Sent. Anyone else’s first attempt to do that is held at Pending Approval instead — the invoice waits until a finance manager or administrator opens it and clicks Approve (or Reject, which sends it back to Draft with a note). Once an invoice has already reached a given status, editing other details on it again doesn’t re-trigger this hold.

The moment an invoice first reaches Sent, Paid, or Overdue — whether that’s an immediate save or an approval — two things happen automatically, each exactly once per invoice:

That journal only posts if the company uses double-entry accounting — a simple-mode company records the invoice itself but never gets a GL entry for it. Separately, if the invoice has a Warehouse set, any line linked to a real product ships stock out of that warehouse at the same time — service-only invoices with no warehouse simply never ship anything.

3Record a payment

From the invoice, click Record Payment. You’ll need an amount (can’t exceed the outstanding balance) and a real bank account to receive it into — payment can’t be recorded without one. This creates a real inflow transaction in Banking, not just a note on the invoice.

The invoice’s balance drops by the payment amount; once the balance reaches zero (allowing for rounding), the invoice’s status flips to Paid automatically. Partial payments are fine — the balance just carries forward and the status stays wherever it was.

Common tasks

Billing a client for costs you already paid

If a Purchases line or an Expenses entry was marked billable to a specific customer, you can pull it straight onto that customer’s invoice instead of retyping it.

1. Start the invoice for that customer

   Pick the real customer contact the cost was marked billable to.

2. Open “+ Add Billable Costs”

   This shows every uninvoiced Purchases line and Expenses entry billed to this customer — each one shows what it was and how much.

3. Pull in what applies and save

   Once the invoice saves, each pulled-in cost is marked as invoiced on its original record, so it can’t accidentally get billed to this (or any) client a second time.

Emailing an invoice

Click Email on the invoice. This only works if the customer has an email address on file — either from their Contacts record or typed directly when you created the invoice. The email includes the line items, subtotal, discount, tax, total, and balance due.

Rejecting an invoice awaiting approval

A finance manager or administrator can click Reject on any invoice sitting at Pending Approval, with an optional note. This sends it straight back to Draft — nothing has posted to your books yet at that stage, so there’s nothing to reverse. The person who submitted it can fix whatever needs fixing and resubmit.

Reference

Invoice statuses

What this module doesn’t do