Invoices

What it is

Invoices is where you ask a customer for money and keep track of whether they have paid. You open it from the left menu: Work›Invoices. On a phone, tap the last button in the bar along the bottom of the screen and pick Invoices under Management.

Every invoice has three parts. There is the list, which is your money-owed board. There is the editor, where you type in the customer, the line items and the due date. And there is the customer portal — a web page with its own link that only your customer has, where they read the invoice, download it as a PDF and pay by card or bank transfer.

Invoices are separate from Estimates. An estimate is the price you quote before the work; an invoice is the bill afterwards. An accepted estimate can be turned into an invoice in one click, and the two stay linked.

When to use it

• The job is finished and you need the customer to pay.
• You want the customer to pay by card or bank transfer instead of chasing a cheque.
• Somebody paid you in cash or by bank transfer and you want it recorded against the job.
• You need to see, this morning, exactly how much money is owed and how much of it is late.
• A customer says "can you resend that bill?" — you resend the same invoice rather than making a new one.

Use Estimates instead when you are still quoting and nobody has agreed a price yet. Use the Payments page when you want to see every card transaction across the whole company rather than one invoice at a time.

Before you start

• Your role needs Invoices access. An owner or admin turns this on under Settings›Team Roles, where the switch is called Invoices. Without it the menu item is hidden and the page will not open. Owners and admins always have it. If a role was set up before Invoices got its own switch, it follows whatever the Estimates switch says until somebody sets Invoices deliberately.
• Card payments need to be switched on to work. The company-wide switch is on the Payments page in the left menu, under Customer checkout, and reads Accept online payments on invoices and estimates. With it off, customers can still open and read the invoice but there is no Pay button anywhere.
• Set your invoice defaults once. Go to Settings›Invoice Settings and work through the Defaults tab: Default Tax %, Invoice Number Prefix and Link Expiry (days). Do this before your first invoice or you will be retyping tax on every one.
• Add your payment methods. The Method drop-down you pick when recording a cash or cheque payment is filled from Settings›Payment Methods. If that page is empty, you cannot record a manual payment.
• Fill in the Price Book if you bill the same things repeatedly. It lives under Settings›Quotes & Docs›Estimate Settings, on the Price Book tab, and feeds the Add from Price Book button in the line items.
• You need an email address or a phone number to send. With an email, Save & Send emails the invoice (and texts the link too when the Invoice sent text is on). With only a phone number, it goes out as a text message — as long as that Invoice sent text is switched on under Settings›Quotes & Docs›Estimate Settings, on the SMS tab. With neither, the button stays greyed out with the note Customer email or phone number required to send. You can still use Copy Link and send the link yourself.
• Your company may use different words. "Lead" can be renamed for your account, so the Link to Lead card and the Lead column may read "Job" or something else.

Step-by-step

Create an invoice from scratch

1. Open Work›Invoices and click New Invoice at the top right. (The small + next to Invoices in the left menu, and Create new›Invoice next to your company name, both do the same thing. On a phone, tap New in the page header.)
2. Optional but recommended: open Link to Lead (optional), click Search leads... and pick the job. The customer's name, phone, email and address are copied in for you, and the invoice will show up on that job's Invoices tab afterwards.
3. Fill in Customer Information: Company Name, First Name, Last Name, Email, Phone, and the Address, City, State and Zip where the work happened. There is a second address block for Bill To — leave it blank and the invoice uses the work address.
4. If a customer with that phone number already exists you get an amber bar reading Found existing client with a Use this client button. Click it rather than typing the details again. Otherwise, tick Save customer to directory to add them to your Clients list.
5. Under Line Items, add what you are charging for. Use Add Item to type one in, Add from Price Book to pull a saved one, or Add Section to group items under a heading such as Labor or Materials. Each row takes a name, Qty, Price, an optional discount and tax, and a description.
6. Check the Totals box on the right: Subtotal, Discount, Tax and Total. These are worked out from your line items, but you can type over any of them. A small circular arrow appears next to anything you have overridden — click it to go back to the calculated figure.
7. Set the Due Date. This is what decides whether the invoice turns Overdue later.
8. Add anything the customer should read in Notes to Customer (visible on portal). Anything you do not want them to see goes in Internal Notes (private).
9. Click Save to keep it as a draft, or go straight to sending it (next section).

Turn an accepted estimate into an invoice

1. Open the estimate you already sent and got agreement on.
2. Click Convert to Invoice in the header. The customer, line items and totals all come across.
3. You are taken straight into the new invoice with a message reading Invoice #… created. Set the Due Date, which the estimate did not have.
4. Back on the estimate, the button has now changed to Invoice #… — click it any time to jump between the two. Converting the same estimate again just reopens the invoice you already made; you cannot end up with duplicates.

You can also convert from the estimates list without opening anything: the … menu on an estimate row has a Convert to Invoice item.

Send it to the customer

1. With the invoice open, click Save & Send. Joby saves your changes, builds a PDF copy and emails it to the address on the invoice with the payment link inside.
2. No email address on file? If the customer has a phone number and the Invoice sent text is on, Send to Customer texts them the link instead. Otherwise click Portal to open the customer's page in a new tab, or go back to the list, open the … menu on the row and choose Copy Link. Paste that into a text message.
3. To send several at once, tick the boxes at the start of the rows in the list. A bar appears reading N invoices selected along with how many are ready to send. Click Send.
4. Sending again later is fine and does not create a second invoice — use Send to Customer in the row's … menu. That works on a paid, refunded or cancelled invoice too, for a customer who wants their copy: you are asked to confirm first, the email and text drop the payment request, and the invoice's status does not change.

Record a payment that came in outside Joby

1. Open the invoice and scroll to Payments Received. (On a phone you can skip the editor: tap Record payment on the invoice card in the list and the same box slides up from the bottom.)
2. Type the Amount, choose a Method — cash, cheque, bank transfer, whatever you set up in Settings›Payment Methods — and set the Date the money actually arrived.
3. Put the cheque number or reference in the note field (Check #1234, Zelle ref, etc.) so you can match it up later.
4. Click Add Payment.
5. Part payments are fine. Add the first amount now and the rest when it arrives; the line at the top keeps a running Total received: $X of $Y · $Z remaining.

Card and bank payments the customer makes themselves appear here automatically with a Stripe badge and cannot be deleted. Only payments you typed in by hand carry a Manual badge and a bin button.

Find one particular invoice

1. Type into the search box at the top of the list — Search by name, email, phone, #.... It matches customer name, invoice number, email and phone number.
2. Narrow it with the two drop-downs beside the search box: the status one (Draft, Sent, Overdue, Paid and the rest) and the balance one (Balance due, Past due).
3. Or click one of the four tiles across the top. Overdue filters the list to late invoices in one click.
4. Looking for the invoices on one particular job? Open the job and use its Invoices tab. Same for a customer — open the client record and use their Invoices tab.

How to check it worked

• Saved: the invoice gets a number in the toolbar (for example #INV-1043) and appears at the top of the list, because the list arrives newest first.
• Sent: a confirmation reading Invoice sent to customer appears and you are dropped back on the list. The status badge on the row now says Sent, and a small delivery badge next to it tells you whether the email actually reached them.
• The customer opened it: the badge changes to Viewed by itself, and a date fills in under the Viewed column. On a phone card the timeline line at the bottom changes from Viewed — to a date.
• Payment recorded: you get a Payment recorded message, the running total at the top of Payments Received goes up, and the badge moves to Partially Paid or Paid. The Paid tile at the top of the list goes up too.
• Paid in full: the badge reads Fully Paid, a Read-only label appears in the toolbar, and the customer's page swaps the Pay button for a green thank-you block.
• Bulk send: a message tells you how many went out, plus a separate one listing anything skipped and why.
• Link copied: a Customer link copied message appears. Paste it into a browser yourself to be sure it opens.

Common mistakes

• Making a second invoice instead of resending the first. Resending is free and keeps one record of the debt. Use Send to Customer on the existing row.
• Forgetting the due date. An invoice with no due date never turns Overdue, so it will quietly sit in Open forever and never show up when you chase late money.
• Expecting "due today" to count as overdue. It does not. An invoice only becomes Overdue the day after its due date.
• Bulk send silently skipping rows. Invoices that are already paid, refunded, cancelled, mid-payment, or have no email address (and no phone number to text) are left out on purpose — one click must not chase fifty people who already paid. To send one of those, use Send to Customer on the row. The bar tells you the count before you click, and a message afterwards says exactly which reasons applied.
• Deleting an invoice to "clean up". The confirmation says This cannot be undone and means it. If a job fell through, set the status to Cancelled instead so the history survives.
• Cancelling an invoice that has payments on it. You get a second warning reading This invoice has recorded payments. Cancel it anyway? Stop and check whether a refund is what you actually want.
• Turning off the Pay button without meaning to. If nobody can pay any invoice, check the company switch on the Payments page before blaming the individual invoice.