How Invoices Work — Statuses & Lifecycle

An invoice in Spatiko is a proper accounting document: it’s numbered from a sequence, it freezes when issued, and every correction leaves a paper trail instead of silently rewriting history. This page is the map — what each status means, what you can do in it, and where the tracking lives. For the hands-on walkthrough, start with creating and sending an invoice.

The lifecycle at a glance

Every invoice is in one of five states:

• Draft — editable, un-numbered, owes nothing. Delete it freely or issue it.
• Open — issued: numbered, frozen, counting toward your outstanding receivables. The list shows open invoices by what matters — Issued (not yet emailed), Sent, Partially paid, or Overdue once past the due date.
• Paid — settled in full. The document survives as the record.
• Void — cancelled with its number intact. The debt is gone; the audit trail isn’t.
• Uncollectible — written off as bad debt, out of your receivables.

The one-way door is issuing: it assigns a permanent number and freezes the lines and totals. Numbers are never reused, so an issued invoice can only be voided or credited — not un-issued. Everything before that point is cheap; everything after is documented.

The Invoices list

The Invoices section shows every billing document across every order. The ⓘ next to the title explains the page; the two buttons beside it start the invoices that don’t begin on an order — New consolidated invoice bills one client for many orders at once, and Bill last period runs weekly and monthly billing on demand.

• Totals strip — Outstanding, Overdue, Credited (credit notes issued, shown only once there are any), and the invoice count. All of them follow the filters you’ve set, so filtering to one payer gives you that payer’s numbers.
• Search across invoice number, payer, and property.
• Status — tick one or more of Draft, Open, Overdue, Partially paid, Paid, Void, and Uncollectible.
• Type — Standard, Deposit, Balance, or Consolidated.
• Payer — every client you’ve invoiced.

The table lists Invoice, Payer, Property, Due, Amount (with what’s still due under a partly paid one), and Status; click the Invoice, Payer, Due, or Amount header to sort by it. The property links straight to the order. A combined invoice has no single property, so its row is tagged Consolidated and reads “3 orders · August 2026” instead. Your filters and sort are remembered on that browser for next time.

Working a batch? Tick rows to Issue, Send, or Delete drafts in bulk, or Export CSV — number, status, payer, property, dates, totals, paid, and remaining — for your accountant. Selection covers the rows on the page you’re looking at. Bulk send is explicit about consequences before you confirm: drafts in the selection get numbered first, already-sent invoices get another copy, and anything skipped is listed with its reason.

Fixing and closing invoices

The corrections ladder, from cheapest to most final:

• Delete draft — drafts have no number, so nothing is left behind.
• Revise (open, nothing paid) — copies the invoice into an editable draft; issuing the revision voids the original. The two stay linked in a revision chain on both documents.
• Void (open, nothing paid) — billed by mistake. Keeps the number, cancels the debt. Permanent.
• Issue a credit note (money already paid) — a numbered document that settles as a refund, account credit, or write-off. See credit notes and write-offs.
• Write off (open, balance remaining) — owed but never coming; records bad debt and drops the balance from receivables. Reversible with Undo write-off if the client pays after all.

Each invoice also carries internal notes — private context that never prints on the document — and an Activity timeline logging every event from draft to settlement, including each automatic reminder sent.

What the client receives, and when

Two different documents do two different jobs:

• At booking, the confirmation email attaches a billing document: the order’s live invoice if one has been issued, a receipt if the order is already paid, otherwise a quote-style document of what the job costs — that quote carries no invoice number, since nothing has been formally billed yet. On an order billed to more than one payer, the confirmation attaches no billing document at all; each payer gets their own invoice send.
• When you send an invoice, the payer gets an email with a payment link of its own, and the numbered PDF to download from the page it opens. That’s the document accounts payable is waiting for. A combined invoice’s link opens a public invoice page — no login — where the payer can download the PDF and pay the whole balance at once.

Sales tax prints properly on both: each enabled rate as its own labelled line, with any registration number under your business details. The tax itself comes from the order — see sales tax for rates and per-order overrides.

Order-level payment status

Orders keep their own at-a-glance payment status — unpaid, awaiting payment, partial, paid, overdue, refunded, or partially refunded — rolled up from everything paid and owed on the order, whichever invoices carry it. Online payments update it the moment they clear; manual payments update it when you record them.

Payment history at a client level

Zoom out from a single order and each client’s record has a Billing tab — Owed to you, Credit on file, their payment settings, Pricing, Unpaid orders, and Account activity. For the invoice-level view of the same client, pick them in the Invoices list’s Payer filter, or use View invoices on their Billing tab. The same tab holds their weekly or monthly billing setting and Bill many orders.

Generated in-house

Spatiko produces invoices, receipts, and credit notes itself — numbered, rendered as PDFs, carrying your branding and business details. There’s no separate invoicing or accounting tool to run, and nothing to re-type into a second system to bill a shoot.

Go deeper

• Creating and sending an invoice — the walkthrough this page is the map for.
• Billing several orders on one invoice — one invoice for many orders, and how payments spread across them.
• Revenue and service performance reports — roll invoiced work up into collected versus booked revenue.
• Business profile, branding and legal documents — the company details and branding printed on every document.
• Importing past orders from a CSV — bring billing history across from another platform.