Issue a sales invoice
Personas: Billing clerk (creates the draft), Approver (approves or rejects), Issuer (issues — the number is stamped), Sender (sends it out) · Modules: Sales Invoices, Customers Bill a customer: draft the invoice with its lines, have it approved, issue it (the real SI-number is stamped and open customer credit settles onto it), then send it.
Before you start: the customer exists in Customers (payment terms — due days — make the due date fill itself); the products you bill are in the catalogue; you are in the Billing clerk group, and colleagues sit in the Approver, Issuer and Sender groups (any of them — or an administrator — can complete the matching step).
1. Draft — Billing clerk creates the invoice
In the application shell, open Sales → Sales Invoices and click + New top-right (on a still-empty list the same thing is offered as a New Sales Invoice button in the middle).
Pick the Customer (required) and the invoice Date. Leave Due empty to get date + the customer's due days automatically; a date you pick is respected. Fill the Tax event date — usually the document date.
The rest fills itself in when you click Create — the values are applied server-side, so the open form does not show them yet: Company (your base company), Currency (the issuing company's base currency — see below), Payment method (Bank transfer), Sent method (E-mail) and Due (date + the customer's due days). The Bank account picker is narrowed to the chosen company's accounts. Save — the invoice appears as DRAFT, now showing those defaults, its title still a temporary placeholder, not a number.
Currency is worth a second look. It fills in from the issuing company's base currency (set on the company record; a new tenant ships EUR), and a currency you pick yourself is always respected. Leave it right: a customer payment settles an invoice automatically only when the two are in the same currency, so an invoice in the wrong currency — or in none — quietly never clears itself, however much money arrives against it.
Add lines with the items table's Add button. Pick a Product — its price, unit of measure and tax rate are copied in the moment you pick it (unit and tax-rate lists are narrowed to the product's own); all stay editable. Enter Quantity and an optional Discount. Each line computes itself: Net = quantity × price, VAT = net × VAT-rate (default 20%) / 100, Total = net + VAT − discount — previewed live in the dialog.
The read-only totals footer (Net, VAT, Discount, Total, Paid, Balance) sums the lines; Paid and Balance stay at 0 and Total until money arrives.
2. Approve — Approver (Inbox or inline on the invoice)
- The Approve task shows the invoice's number (placeholder), date, due, customer, total and status, with Approve / Reject buttons. Every task in this flow belongs to a group, not to one person: Claim & open it first — claiming takes it out of your colleagues' queue so two people cannot work the same invoice.
- Approve moves the invoice to APPROVED. Reject cancels it — straight to CANCELLED, never passing through APPROVED.
- The credit gate (automatic). Right after approval the system checks the customer's credit: their open invoice balances plus this invoice against the customer's credit limit (empty limit = unlimited — the check waves everything through). Within the limit, the flow continues to Issue unnoticed. Over it, the invoice does not issue silently — a Credit Hold task appears in the Approver group's Inbox with Proceed / Cancel: proceed sends it on to Issue (credit decisions are human), cancel ends the flow at CANCELLED.
3. Issue — Issuer
- The Issue task shows number, date, customer, total and status; one button: Issue.
- On completion the real sequential SI-number is stamped from the shared "Sales Invoice" series and becomes the document title; the invoice turns ISSUED.
- Immediately after, any unallocated payment balance the customer has is pulled onto the invoice automatically — Paid/Balance update, and the status can jump straight to PARTIAL or PAID.
4. Send — Sender
- The Send task shows number, customer and the Sent method read-only — it is chosen on the invoice header (step 1.3), not on the task, so change it there if it is wrong. Confirm with Send; the invoice becomes SENT.
- Print on the document renders the PDF at any point after issue.
What happened behind the scenes
- Status path: DRAFT → APPROVED → ISSUED → SENT → CONFIRMED (reject: → CANCELLED), then PARTIAL / PAID as money arrives. CONFIRMED is the step the flow reaches after the document has gone out — the stepper on the invoice shows it, and it is where the billing flow itself ends. The number comes from the "Sales Invoice" series only at issue — drafts never consume a number.
- The ledger is fed automatically. After the invoice is issued — and again after a payment is recorded — a Journal Entry Posting → Post task appears in the Accountant group's Inbox: the posting is generated for you and waits for a human to post it. See Post a manual journal entry and the Journal module.
- The totals footer is kept equal to the sums of the line items; Paid is the sum of the invoice's payment allocations, Balance = Total − Paid.
- Payments keep settling automatically: PARTIAL while 0 < paid < total, PAID when paid equals total (see Record a customer payment).
Variations and refusals
- Credit hold: an over-limit customer parks the invoice on the Credit Hold task (see step 2.3) — raise the limit on the customer, collect first, or proceed deliberately.
- Same invoice as last month? Duplicate copies header + lines into a fresh DRAFT; for every period automatically, set up recurring billing.
- Reject at the approve step ends the flow at CANCELLED; start a fresh invoice instead of reviving it.
- An issued invoice is never edited — correct it with a credit or debit note, or, while nothing is paid, void it.
- A line without a product works — type a free-text name, price and quantity.