Creating & Sending an Invoice

A brokerage wants a proper invoice with a number on it before accounts payable will move. In Spatiko that’s a three-step flow: draft the invoice from the order, check the lines, and issue-and-send. The client gets a PDF and a payment link; you get a numbered receivable that tracks itself.

Creating new invoices needs a paid plan — see the pricing page. Everything already issued stays readable, payable, and closable regardless.

Start from the order

An invoice for a single order starts on that order’s Billing card. Open the order and use New invoice:

• For the full order — one invoice covering everything on the order.
• For a deposit… — a share of the total, as a percentage or fixed amount. See deposits and balance invoices.
• For the remaining balance — everything no invoice covers yet.

On an order with several people on it, the menu also asks who the invoice bills — each participant can be the payer of their own invoice. Billing a second payer on one order needs a plan with split billing; see the pricing page.

Billing one client for many orders at once — a brokerage’s month of shoots, say — is a combined invoice, started from the Invoices page, a client’s Billing tab, or the Orders list. See billing several orders on one invoice.

Edit the draft

A new invoice opens as a draft — no number yet, nothing owed yet, and everything editable. The draft starts from the order’s line items, and you can change the description, quantity, unit amount, and per-line discount on any row, toggle whether a line is taxable, or add a custom line.

• Invoice discount takes either a dollar amount or a percentage — flip the $ / % switch beside it. A percentage recalculates as you edit the lines; once the invoice is issued, the discount is frozen at the amount it came to.
• Terms and due date stay in step. Pick Due on Receipt or Net 15 / 30 / 45 / 60 and the due date moves to match; pick a date that matches none of them and the terms read Custom date. Leave the due date empty and it’s worked out from the terms when you issue.

Two draft tools worth knowing:

• Refresh from order replaces every line with the order’s current items — useful when you’ve changed the order since drafting, but it discards line edits you haven’t saved.
• Delete draft removes it entirely. Drafts have no number, so nothing is left behind.

Tax isn’t typed on the invoice — it comes from the order’s tax setup, including any per-order override.

Issue it

Issuing is the point of no return: the invoice gets a permanent number (like INV-2026-0042), the lines and totals freeze, and the balance starts counting toward your outstanding receivables. Numbers are never reused, so an issued invoice can only be voided or credited — not un-issued.

Issue & send does both steps at once. The dialog shows who’ll be emailed — the invoice’s payer, with any cc or bcc addresses their client record carries — and lets you add a personal message or send to a different address instead.

Un-tick the payer row to issue without sending: the invoice gets its number and counts toward receivables, but nobody is emailed and automatic reminders stay off until you send it. The invoice page shows a banner so an issued-but-unsent invoice never hides from you.

What the client receives

The email sums up the invoice and carries a payment link; the page it opens is where the client can download the invoice PDF. For an order’s invoice, the link opens the order’s delivery page, where the client pays online by card — through whichever card processor you have active — with no account or login needed. (A combined invoice links to a public invoice page of its own instead.) If they pay another way, record the payment and the invoice updates the same.

Chasing payment by text or chat? Once an invoice is issued, its ⋯ menu has Copy payment link (Copy invoice link once it’s paid). It opens a dialog with the very link the invoice email carries, ready to copy — no second email to the client. The link is personal to the payer, so anyone holding it can open and pay the invoice; share it only with them. A draft has no link yet, and an invoice with no email address to bill needs one added first.

Payments apply to the invoice automatically: the invoice page’s Payments tab lists every payment applied with its amount, method, reference, and date, and the Activity tab keeps the full timeline — drafted, issued, sent, reminded, paid.

Auto-issue on delivery

If you’d rather never think about the send step, switch on Auto-issue invoice on delivery in Settings → Payments: when an order without a download paywall is delivered for the first time, its invoice is issued and emailed automatically. It’s off by default, and two kinds of order are skipped:

• Orders using the pay-to-download gate — those collect through the download paywall instead.
• Orders for clients on weekly or monthly billing — their shoots wait for the period’s combined invoice rather than each getting its own.

The same settings area also holds your invoice number prefix and an invoice footer note — payment terms, a thank-you line, or legal text printed at the bottom of every invoice PDF.

Fixing a mistake

• Wrong lines or details, nothing paid yet — Revise. It copies the invoice into an editable draft; issuing the revision voids the original, and both stay linked in a revision chain.
• Billed by mistake, nothing paid yet — Void. The invoice keeps its number for the audit trail, but the debt is cancelled. Permanent.
• Money already moved — issue a credit note instead.

For the full lifecycle — statuses, write-offs, and what each state allows — see how invoices work.

Go deeper

• How invoices work — statuses and lifecycle — draft, open, paid, void, and uncollectible, and what each allows.
• Deposits and balance invoices — split one order’s billing into a deposit now and the balance later.
• Billing several orders on one invoice — one combined invoice for a client’s week or month of shoots.
• Agents, sellers, and billing contacts — who can be a payer, and what each person sees.
• Business profile, branding and legal documents — the company details and branding printed on every invoice.