Set up recurring billing

Personas: Billing clerk (creates the template), Approver / Issuer / Sender (handle each generated invoice through the normal flow) · Modules: Sales Invoices Bill the same customer the same lines every period — hosting, support retainers, subscriptions — without retyping the invoice. You describe the subscription once as an Invoice Template; on the 1st of each period the system creates the draft invoices for you, and your Inbox becomes the "invoices to issue today" worklist.

Before you start: the customer, products, prices and tax rates exist as master data.

1. Create the template — Billing clerk

1. In the Sales sidebar group open Invoice Templates and click New Invoice Template.
2. Give it a human name — this is the subscription's label ("Acme — monthly hosting"). Pick the Customer (required); Company, Currency and Payment method come pre-filled as on an invoice.
3. Pick the Recurrence — MONTHLY (default), QUARTERLY or YEARLY.
4. Leave Active on. An inactive template is a paused subscription — kept, but generating nothing.
5. Save, then add the lines exactly as on an invoice: pick a Product (price, unit and tax rate copy themselves), set the quantity. The read-only footer shows what each generated invoice will total. A template has no number, no status and no flow — it is not a document, it is the recipe for one.

Shortcut — Save as Template: open any existing sales invoice and click Save as Template: the header and all lines are copied into a new template (named after the invoice number — rename it), ready to set a recurrence.

2. The invoices arrive — the system

1. At 04:00 on the 1st of every month (of January/April/July/October for quarterly; of January for yearly) the schedule takes every active template of that recurrence and creates one DRAFT sales invoice per template — dated that day, lines copied, line arithmetic recomputed, due date from the customer's payment terms, number placeholder as on any new invoice.
2. Each generated draft starts the normal approval flow — the Approve tasks are waiting in the Inbox that morning.

3. Issue as usual — Approver / Issuer / Sender

1. From here nothing is special: approve, issue (the real SI number is stamped), send — see Issue a sales invoice. Reject a generated draft you don't want this period; the template is untouched and will generate again next period.

What happened behind the scenes

• Three schedules (monthly / quarterly / yearly) filter active templates by their Recurrence and create the drafts through the normal repositories — so numbering placeholders, DRAFT status, due-date terms, line calculations and the approval process all fire exactly as for a hand-made invoice.
• The generated invoice is a full, independent document; editing it never touches the template.

Variations and refusals

• Pause a subscription: untick Active on the template. Resume by ticking it back — generation picks it up at the next period boundary.
• Price change: edit the template's lines; the change applies from the next generated invoice. Already-generated drafts keep their copied prices (edit them individually if needed).
• One-off copy without a template: any sales invoice can be duplicated (header + lines into a fresh DRAFT) — the quick path when "same as last time" is occasional, not periodic.

See also

• Sales Invoices module · Issue a sales invoice