Tracking invoices

Once you've created invoices, it's a good idea to keep track of how what's happened once they've been created. The ultimate goal for any of your invoices is to have them fully paid. Tracking their progress helps you see what stage they're at and if you need to take any action to help them along.

Working with sales invoices

To look at individual invoices, you need to go to Sales and select Sales Invoices. From here you can view invoice details, check whether an invoice has been issued, email, copy or edit an existing invoice or pay an invoice. You can also create a credit note or print a delivery note.

Document timeline

To help you manage sales invoices, within each invoice you can view details such as when you created the invoice, if you emailed or printed it and when the invoice was paid using the document timeline.

The document timeline is visible on sales invoices created after 1 March 2019.

Hover over the Created, Sent, Viewed and Paid pips in the document timeline to see more information about the current status.

Created

Shows the date and time you created the invoice.

Sent

Sent as PDF – Shows as manually submitted. If you then email the invoice, it will change to emailed.

Emailed – Shows the customer’s email address or addresses and the date and time you sent the email for all email addresses in the To and CC lines of the email.

  • Green – at least one email has successfully sent.
  • Red – all emails have failed to deliver.
You may need to refresh this page to update this status.

Viewed

Shows the email address and date when the customer viewed the email.

If tracking is important, you can clear the Include attachment check box in the email window.

If your customer’s email provider doesn’t confirm when they view emails, the Viewed status doesn’t update. This means your customer may have viewed the sales invoice even if the status hasn’t changed.

To use the viewed status, you must email the invoice when you create the invoice or when you click into the individual invoice. It is not possible to track the viewed status if you email it from the Sales Invoices page.

Paid

Shows the date of the last payment recorded on the sales invoice.

The colour of the pip indicates they payment status:

  • Green – Fully paid
  • Light Orange – Part paid
  • Dark Orange – Overdue

What's next?

Set up banking and track spending and payments