An invoice in Paylent is in exactly one of four states, and the state decides what you are allowed to do to it.
The four states
- Draft — Editable, unnumbered, deletable. Nobody has seen it.
- Issued — Numbered and frozen. A claim somebody can act on.
- Paid — Every penny accounted for, by money arriving or by being credited.
- Void — Cancelled after issue. It keeps its number and stays on the record.
An issued invoice that has passed its due date without being settled is flagged as overdue. Overdue is not a fifth state; it is a fact about an issued invoice.
Drafts
A draft is a working document. Change anything, as often as you like, and delete it if it turns out not to be needed — a deleted draft leaves no number behind, because it never had one.
Each line carries a description, a quantity, a unit price and its own tax rate. The total updates as you write, and it is arrived at by the same arithmetic the saved invoice uses, so the running total and the finished invoice cannot round differently.
Alongside the lines:
- A due date, filled in from your payment terms so the usual one needs no typing. Change it when a customer has different terms. An invoice without one is never overdue and so is never chased.
- Your customer’s reference — their purchase order number, printed so their accounts payable department can match it.
- A note that appears on the invoice your customer opens.
Issuing
Issuing does two things at once, and neither can be undone:
- It assigns the next number in your business’s own sequence.
- It freezes what the invoice says.
Both matter for the same reason. A number you have quoted to a customer has to mean one thing, so it cannot be reused and its contents cannot change underneath it.
Issue and send does both steps in one click, which is the usual case: an issued invoice nobody was told about is the worst state to leave one in. The two actions stay separate underneath, so a send that fails says so plainly rather than looking like nothing happened.
Correcting an issued invoice
There are two honest ways, and which one is right depends on what went wrong.
Void is for a mistake — the wrong customer, the wrong job, an invoice that should never have been raised. It keeps its number and its place in the sequence, marked as cancelled, and you raise a fresh one saying the right thing.
A credit note is for everything else: a partial refund, a goodwill reduction agreed after the fact, one line billed in error. Voiding a £1,200 invoice because £200 of it was wrong throws away a number your customer has already quoted in their own books.
A credit note carries an amount and a reason. It has its own number sequence, because accounting treats a credit note as a document rather than an annotation — a business is asked for “credit note 4”, not “the credit on invoice 9”. It cannot be edited afterwards, which is what makes it a record of a credit rather than a note about one.
Money arriving and money credited count together. Credit part of an invoice and the rest of it still stands and is still owed; credit all of it and the invoice is settled.
Sending
Sending emails the invoice to the customer with a private link to it. The link is unguessable, and it is the whole of the authentication: anyone with the link can see the invoice, and nobody without it can. If a link goes astray, rotate it and the old one stops working.
Replies go to your own address rather than to us, so a customer who has a question about the invoice reaches the person who raised it.
You can send an issued invoice again — sending it twice does not change its number or its contents. For following up on one that has gone unpaid, see Chasing payment.
Printing, and saving as a PDF
The page your customer opens is the printable document, so Open & print takes you there and opens your browser’s own print dialogue. Every browser can save that as a PDF. There is no separate download that could disagree with what the customer sees, because it is the same page.
Repeating an invoice
For work that repeats on a rhythm — a retainer, a monthly licence — use a schedule. See Recurring invoices.
For work that repeats irregularly, the same job for the same client twice a year, duplicate the invoice. You get a fresh draft with the customer, lines and notes copied. Deliberately not copied: the number, the status, the dates, the payments and the public link — those belong to the invoice that was sent, not to a new one that has not been.
Finding things later
The list has tabs for all, drafts, outstanding, paid and void, and flags the overdue ones. Outstanding is the useful one most days: issued, not void, and not yet settled.
Search matches the three things somebody usually has to hand — the customer, the number off the invoice, and your customer’s own reference. It composes with the tabs, and it lives in the address, so a search you have narrowed down is a link you can send to somebody.
What happened to it
Every invoice keeps a trail of what was done to it and by whom: issued, sent, paid, chased, credited, voided. It is append-only, and it is where to look when an invoice is not in the state you expected.