From proforma invoice to real invoice

Personas: Billing clerk (creates the proforma, later generates the invoice), Approver (confirms or rejects) · Modules: Sales Invoices The pay-first workflow: send the customer a proforma — a payment request, not a tax document (no tax event date, no VAT liability) — collect the money, then turn it into the real sales invoice with one click.

Before you start: the customer and the products exist; a colleague sits in the Approver group.

1. Draft — Billing clerk creates the proforma

1. Open Sales → Proforma Invoices and click + New top-right.
2. Pick the Customer (required), the Date (required) and optionally a Due date. Company, Currency, Payment method (Bank transfer) and the company-narrowed Bank account are pre-filled and editable. There is no tax event date — a proforma carries no tax liability.
3. Save — unlike a sales invoice, the proforma is numbered immediately, from its own "Proforma" series (PF prefix); the number is the document title from the start. Status: DRAFT.
4. Add lines exactly like invoice lines: pick a Product (price, unit, tax rate copy in), enter Quantity and an optional Discount; Net, VAT and Total (= net + VAT − discount) compute themselves, summed in the read-only footer.

2. Confirm — Approver (Inbox or inline)

1. The Confirm task shows number, date, customer, total and status — Confirm / Reject.
2. Confirm moves the proforma to CONFIRMED — send it and await the payment. Reject ends it at CANCELLED.

3. Generate the invoice — Billing clerk

1. When the money is in (recorded as a customer payment — it waits as unallocated credit), open the confirmed proforma and click Generate Invoice.
2. A draft sales invoice is created for the same customer, company, currency and payment method, dated today. Add its lines on the invoice — the action creates the header.
3. The proforma flips itself to INVOICED the moment the invoice exists — the pill tells you at a glance which proformas still await their invoice.
4. The new invoice walks its own normal flow — approve, issue (the real SI-number from the "Sales Invoice" series), send; see Issue a sales invoice. At issue, the customer's waiting payment credit auto-allocates onto it — often stamping it PAID immediately.

What happened behind the scenes

• Proforma status path: DRAFT → CONFIRMED → INVOICED (reject: → CANCELLED).
• Two number series: the proforma consumes from "Proforma" at create; the generated invoice consumes from "Sales Invoice" only at its issue step.

Variations and refusals

• A rejected (CANCELLED) proforma stays for the record; raise a new one rather than reviving it.
• The generated invoice is an ordinary draft — it can still be rejected at its approve step even though the proforma reads INVOICED.

See also

• Sales Invoices module · Issue a sales invoice · Record a customer payment