As soon as an invoice is created you will find all of the chargeable line items on the job such as completed tasks, labour time (on-site or travel) and inventory have been added to the invoice as line items along with their tax type. Once you have reviewed and finalised the invoice, including adding any one-off charges or discounts, the invoice is ready to send to the customer.

Once you email the invoice to the customer, they will be able to view it via a live web-view link, which always displays the latest invoiced values. Meanwhile you can manage the invoice lifecycle, make the necessary revisions to the charges, record the payments and cancel/void invoices that are no longer valid.
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In this article, we will see how to:

To compose the email, specify the recipients and type in the email body. When sent, Loc8 will automatically add the live web-view link to the Invoice at the end of the email body. 

You may also add comments for your internal records, which can be referred to any time by you or your team from the Messages tab of the Invoice.
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On send, the invoice progresses to the next status Pending Payment (where it will remain until it is paid in full), and a new email should be available in the specified recipients' inbox with the web-view link to the invoice.

The invoice opens up in a new browser tab with a layout based on a pre-formatted template that displays information relevant to your customer such as your organisation details, your customer's contact details, timestamps, Invoice and Job IDs, Due and Issue Dates, and the main section on line items with the tax amount.
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The format is easy to print and save as a PDF.

For every sent invoice, a copy of the email is available in plain text under the Messages tab for future reference.

Note: If you are using a financial integration such as Xero or QuickBooks Online, invoices will sync immediately once they move into Pending Payment in Loc8. As such, if you wish to send the invoice from your financial system, simply select the invoice status of Pending Payment manually, and don't select the Send email to customer option.

If you need to edit an invoice once it has been sent or otherwise updated to Pending Payment or Paid, you can achieve this by using the Revise button on the invoice inspector.

The purpose of revision is to ensure the integrity of the charges and details on a sent or otherwise actioned invoice, whilst still providing the ability to make changes. Because invoices are sent from Loc8 via a live web-view, revision also provides the ability to make changes and additions with ease such that your customer only has to reopen the web-view link previously sent to them or refresh the browser tab to review the changes in real time.

If desired, once your revision is complete you can always resend the updated invoice via email to be more specific with the customer about the revised invoiced.

Once Revise has been clicked, Loc8 prompts you to confirm if you wish to continue, and if you have already sent the invoice, will notify you of that.

When you're in the revision mode, you can then edit the values and details just as you would when creating the invoice. 

For example, you can add the newly accrued charges for the task, labour or inventory from the initiating job.

Or, add any arbitrary one-off charges.

Or, specify any discounts offered to the customer.

As you make revisions to the invoice, the changes are instantly visible via the live web-view if it has been provided to the customer. To know how the changes appear to the customer, just open the web view from the invoice inspector. 

The revised invoice now reflects the newly added charges and discount.

As the final step to revising the invoice, you may choose to resend the invoice to the recipients.

Note: If an invoice has been synced with an external financial system such as Xero or QuickBooks Online, the Revise button will not be visible, as all changes must be made in the external system.

When an invoice is in the status of Pending Payment you have two options for updating the payment status. You can either manually change its status to Paid, and input the total paid amount inline, or alternatively you can use the Update payment action available on its inspector. In both cases, you can ensure the Paid amount in Loc8 accurately reflects any payments the customer has made, whether the customer pays the full amount at once or chooses to make part payments over a certain period. 

In all scenarios, updating the paid amount helps to keep your financial records up-to-date by reflecting how much is Due. Once you have updated the paid amount to match the invoice total, the system automatically sets the payment Due to zero, indicating the invoice has been successfully paid. You can then mark this invoice status as Paid to complete the invoice lifecycle.

Let's take an example when the customer pays in arbitrary amounts. When you receive the payment, use the Update Payment option and record the payment as shown below:

The paid amount instantly appears in the Financials section of the invoice:

Each time the paid amount is updated, you will see the numbers adjusted in the Paid and Due amount to the latest figures. 

Once you receive the final payment, which in the example is the remaining $1033.50, enter the total payment, that is $1633.50.

You can now move the invoice to the Paid status, to indicate all of the invoice values from the initiating job and other additional charges related to the job have been paid.

NOTE: A paid invoice allows you to revise the charges on the invoice if necessary, upon which can change the status back to Pending Payment and continue the lifecycle once again.

Voiding or cancelling an invoice will typically be used in two scenarios:

You can void an invoice at any point in its lifecycle, for example you will void a Pending Payment invoice as shown below:

Once you cancel an invoice, you will not be able to change it back in its lifecycle. You can still view the values and details if the invoice, but you cannot edit them.

This completes all of the actions you will perform when managing an invoice.
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