Writing an invoice

A line is what, how many, how much

Description, quantity, unit price. Quantities go to three decimal places, so 1.5 hours is exactly 1.5 hours and 0.25 days is a quarter of a day. The unit is free text — hours, days, items, metres.

If you bill the same thing repeatedly, save it once as a saved item and pull it onto a line in one tap.

What is behind the tune control

Every line has a small control that opens two extra fields, and it stays lit when the line is carrying one of them:

• Discount on this line, as a percentage or a fixed amount.
• Tax for this line, if it differs from the rest of the document.

A whole-invoice discount lives under the totals. It is spread back across the lines proportionally, so the per-line figures still add up to the total — a discount that makes the parts stop summing to the whole is a discount that will be queried.

Dates

The issue date is the date the document says it was issued, and it is the date every report uses — it is the tax point in most places, and it is the only date every kind of document has.

The due date is picked as terms: on receipt, 7, 14 or 30 days from issue, or a specific date. Your usual terms can be set once in Settings and then apply to every new invoice.

Quotes and credit notes carry no due date at all. Nobody owes anything on an offer, and a quote that goes red and says “Late” a month after it was written is the app being wrong out loud.

Quotes and credit notes

• New quote writes the same kind of document with its own numbering sequence. It is never counted in what you are owed. When it is accepted, Turn into an invoice copies every line across without retyping.
• Credit note — from a finished invoice's own menu — opens a draft that copies the original's lines and points back at its number. The original invoice is never touched. In reports, credit notes subtract.
• Duplicate copies any document into a new draft, which is the fastest way to bill something similar next month.

Finishing, and what it locks

Finish invoice does three things at once:

1. Allocates the next number in the sequence, in one step, so two documents can never take the same one.
2. Freezes a copy of your business details, the client's details, the tax rates and the payment methods onto the document.
3. Moves it out of draft, so it appears in totals and in what you are owed.

That freeze is why correcting a tax rate next year does not silently rewrite last year's invoice, and why changing your address does not change the address on a document somebody already has.

Correcting and cancelling

• Unlock to edit reopens a finished document. Fixing it and finishing again keeps the original number and the original issue date.
• Cancel it voids the document. It keeps its number — the sequence stays unbroken — and stops counting anywhere.
• Delete draft only exists for drafts that never took a number. Once a number has been spent, cancelling is the only way out.