Invoices and AR Raising one, what each state means, and the two things that make an invoice hard to argue with.

An invoice is a request for money with a record attached. Most of the value here is in what it is attached to.

Raising one

Two routes, and the first is almost always better.

From a deal. The customer, the amounts and the terms come from the record, so nothing is retyped and nothing can disagree with what was agreed.

From scratch, for anything with no deal behind it.

The wizard walks through the customer, the line items, the tax treatment per line, the dates and the terms. Line items carry quantity, rate and their own tax, because a real invoice frequently mixes treatments.

The states

State	Means
Draft	Being written. Nothing has been sent.
Sent	With the customer.
Pending	Awaiting something before it can proceed.
Paid	Settled.
Overdue	Past its due date and not settled.
Cancelled	Withdrawn.

Draft is a real state and worth using. An invoice being checked by somebody else should sit in draft rather than being sent and corrected, because a corrected invoice in a customer's inbox is a conversation you did not need.

Overdue is derived, not set. It follows from the due date, so it is accurate without anybody maintaining it.

Partial payment

An invoice records what is due and what has been paid as separate figures.

That means an installment, a deposit, or a customer who paid most of it is represented properly rather than being either paid or unpaid. The balance is what remains, and the aging works from the balance rather than the original amount.

This matters more than it sounds for anybody selling to businesses, where paying in parts is normal and a system that cannot express it produces a receivables list that is wrong in both directions.

Currency

An invoice is issued in whatever currency the customer is billed in.

Alongside it, the same amount is stored in your base currency, converted at the point the transaction happened. Totals across the business sum the base amount.

That is the difference between a receivables figure you can act on and one that quietly adds different currencies together. It also means a rate moving afterwards does not retroactively change what a past invoice was worth.

Tax

Tax is per line rather than per invoice, because a single invoice frequently mixes standard-rated work with something zero-rated or outside scope.

The rates available are configured once for your organisation, and there is a full article on how that is set up.

Sending

An invoice can be sent from the platform, and what the customer receives is a proper document with your branding.

Two habits are worth having. Check the customer's address before the first invoice to them, because it is copied from the record and the record may never have been checked. And say what it is for in the description, since a line reading "Professional services" and a number is the most common cause of an invoice sitting in somebody's queue for a fortnight.

Line items

An invoice is built from lines, each with a description, a quantity, a rate and its own tax treatment.

Two habits make invoices easier to get paid.

One line per thing the customer recognises. A single line for a month of work invites the question of what it covered; four lines naming the deliverables does not.

Describe it in their language. An internal project code means nothing to the person approving payment, and an invoice they cannot interpret goes to the bottom of the pile.

AR, and reading it honestly

The receivables view shows what is owed, by whom, and how late.

Aging bands are the useful shape, not the total. A hundred thousand owed is a number; a hundred thousand of which most is over ninety days is a problem, and the two look identical on a single line.

Sort by age, not by size. The largest debt is not usually the one at risk. The oldest one is.

Look at concentration. Half your receivables owed by one customer is a different business risk from the same amount spread across thirty, and neither the total nor the average will tell you.

Terms and due dates

The due date is what drives everything downstream: whether an invoice is overdue, which aging band it sits in, and when chasing starts.

Set terms deliberately rather than accepting a default. Thirty days is a convention, not a law, and for a small or new customer shorter terms are entirely reasonable.

Agree them before the work, not on the invoice. An invoice is a poor place to introduce a payment term the customer has not seen, and it is the most common reason a first invoice sits unpaid while somebody internally decides whether to accept it.

Numbering

Invoice numbers are issued by the platform in a sequence configured for your organisation, per legal entity where you trade from more than one.

That sequencing matters for audit: gaps and duplicates are both questions somebody will ask eventually, and a system-issued sequence is the answer.

What happens in the books

A sent invoice posts to the general ledger on its own, and so does a payment against it.

Nobody has to make an entry. Which accounts it hits is decided by the mapping layer, which is inspectable and editable, and covered in its own article.

Attaching it to the right thing

An invoice raised from a deal carries the link, and that link is what makes the rest of the platform useful.

The deal shows what has been invoiced against it. The customer shows their history. The reporting can answer what a deal was actually worth rather than what it was expected to be worth.

An invoice raised from scratch and mentioning the customer in the description has none of that, and nothing later can reconstruct it. If there is a record, raise it from the record.

Cancelling and correcting

An invoice can be cancelled.

For anything already sent, cancel and reissue rather than editing quietly. A customer holding a document that no longer matches yours is the situation to avoid, and the extra minute is cheaper than the phone call.

Credit notes exist as a capability and have no screen yet. Where you need to reduce an invoice rather than withdraw it, the practical route today is to cancel and reissue for the corrected amount, and to agree it with the customer first so there is no gap where neither document is authoritative.