Documentation -> Billing/Invoicing -> Invoices

Intro

Invoices in flowlog are fairly flexible and are an easy way to process payments made to you, with the added bonus of increased visibility into your dealings with your customers. When you create an Invoice in flowlog, it uses your books, groups and account settings to automatically create your bookkeeping entries for the invoice/invoice items. To see what bookkeeping flowlog did on your behalf, simply view the entry it created. It is just like an entry you would have created manually, except it will be locked from editing, b/c allowing editing would allow the invoice to become out of sync with the entry. To make invoicing quicker and less tedious, flowlog will sum up your invoice items for you, like a spreadsheet with formulas would do.

Recurring Invoices

If you have a service or product that recurs that you need to invoice a customer for each month, quarter, year, etc. you can set the invoice as recurring and choose a recurrance frequency. flowlog will then automatically create a new "clone" of the invoice on the dates that correspond to the frequency you have chosen. If the customer pays the invoice with the flowlog payment page for that invoice flowlog will even mark the invoice paid for you and complete the required bookkeeping entries. In other words, once you set up your recurring invoices you won't have to do anything after that. If they don't pay with the flowlog payment page, it's as simple as clicking on the "paid" button, and flowlog will handle the rest. If the details of the invoice change down the line, you simply click the "stop recurring" button on the original recurring invoice and create a new one with the new prices, etc. From that point on, the automatically generated/cloned invoices will use the new info. It's that easy.

Sales Tax

If you have any invoice items (services, products, etc) that may need to have sales tax applied by flowlog, you will probably want to set a default sales tax percent in your books edit page, as a decimal with no percent sign. Then, flowlog will use this in any invoice where you have enabled sales tax to be applied. You can override the sales tax rate for any given invoice if you need to. flowlog will automatically calculate the sales tax and apply it to the invoice total for your convenience. Please note that using the flowlog calculated/applied sales tax is an "all or nothing" affair for an invoice, as it is applied to the subtotal and there is no means to mark individual line items as taxable/nontaxable. If you have enabled sales tax for the current invoice and you have some items which don't need to be taxed, you will need to create a separate invoice for those items.

Invoice Notification and Payment Page

If you enable notification for an invoice, flowlog will email the customer a privacy-respecting notification (on the invoice's Send Date) that has a custom link to an invoice payment page for that invoice. The customer simply clicks on the link, reviews the invoice and if you have set your coinpayments.net merchant details in the edit page for the set of books, a payment button will be shown at the bottom of the page. After clicking, they can choose to pay with any cryptocurrency you have enabled in your coinpayments.net account settings, or pay with USD via coinpayments.net's Paypal passthrough feature. [update] The Paypal Passthrough feature was disabled for new coinpayments.net accounts by CoinPayments during development of this flowlog feature. Now we are reevaluating how to handle payment. Please see the coinpayments.net setup screencast. [coming soon]. When coinpayments.net or paypal.com notify flowlog that the customer payment is complete, flowlog will mark the invoice as paid, and perform the appropriate bookeeping.

Note regarding privacy: Even your company/books name is excluded from the notification email, because including it would mean that email providers would get everyone's customer list. Therefore, you may wish to let your customers know in advance what the flowlog email notification is all about, prior to sending them their first invoice.

If you already have a means of invoice notification and payment for a particular service or product with an existing customer, you can use the flowlog invoice as an internal record keeping instrument, and automatic entry generator, without using the notification and/or payment page features.