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Part of Invoices and receipts: the fields that survive contact with reality
Checklist for invoices and receipts software covering correction, part-payment and export
Invoicing software: a buyer's checklist covering correcting, part-payment, reconciling and export, plus a five-step trial script and what to ask your accountant.
Most invoicing tools are demonstrated on the minute when you create an invoice. The other stages are where they fail: part payment, correction, reconciliation, export.
This page names no products. It walks the six stages of an invoice's life and says what to test at each, so you can run any candidate through the whole cycle in an afternoon.
What to take away
- Judge a tool on correcting, reconciling, and exporting invoices, not on producing them.
- Anything that cannot pass all five steps below is not finished.
- Ask your accountant which stage they care about before you ask a vendor anything.
The trial script, in order:
- Raiseone invoice with a named tax line and a deposit credit, then check the arithmetic by hand.
- Send it to yourselfand open the attachment on a phone.
- Part-pay it.Record a payment below the total and confirm the balance changes.
- Credit one lineof the sent invoice and confirm the original still reads as sent.
- Export everythingand open each file on a machine that has never seen the tool.
The six stages
The tool must
- Create
- Let you control numbering, entity names, line descriptions, tax presentation, and currency
- Send
- Produce a fixed-format document and, if needed, a structured file; send from your own domain
- Get paid
- Accept part payments, deposits, and payments covering several invoices
- Reconcile
- Match bank lines to invoices, issue receipts, show unapplied cash
- Correct
- Issue credit notes and voids that keep the original intact
- Archive and leave
- Export every document as sent, plus the ledger behind it
How to test it in a trial
- Create
- Raise an invoice with a deposit credit and a named tax line, and check the arithmetic by hand
- Send
- Send one to yourself and open it on a phone
- Get paid
- Record a payment that covers two invoices and part of a third
- Reconcile
- Import a bank statement line and allocate it
- Correct
- Credit one line of a sent invoice and look at what happened to the original
- Archive and leave
- Export everything and open the files somewhere else
Each stage in more detail follows.
Six stages of invoicing software
- Createcontrol numbering, names, tax, currency
- Sendfixed document from your own domain
- Get paidpart payments, deposits, multi-invoice
- Reconcilematch bank lines, issue receipts
- Correctcredit notes and voids keep original
- Archive and leaveexport every document
Create
The invoices and receipts overview lists the fields an invoice needs. Check that the tool lets you fill every one of them, and specifically:
Invoice creation fields to verify
- Set starting number and format yourself
- Hold registered name and billing address separately
- Free-text line descriptions with date or period
- Configure tax display and named tax line
- Set currency per customer as a code
- Numbering is yours.You can set the starting number, the format, and whether credit notes and receipts have their own sequence. A tool that numbers by its own rules makes your gaps invisible.
- Customer records hold the registered name and the billing address separatelyfrom the person who orders. Otherwise the invoice goes to the wrong entity by default.
- Descriptions are free text per line, with a place for a date or period per line. Product catalogs are fine, but the line must still say when.
- Tax presentation is configurable, including inclusive versus exclusive display and a named tax line. What the tax should be is a question for your accountant and your tax authority's invoicing rules; the tool's job is to display it the way they tell you to.
- Currency is a field, set per customer, shown as a code.
Send
- Produces a fixed document (a PDF is the usual answer) that opens without the tool.
- Sends from an address on your domain, or lets you download and send yourself. Invoices from a vendor's address get filtered and get questioned.
- Can attach a covering message you control.
- If your customers or your tax authority require a structured electronic invoice format, supports it. Ask them which; do not assume. The European Union's VAT invoicing rules are the kind of source that settles it.
- Handles customer portals. Many larger customers accept invoices only through their own upload page, and the tool needs to produce a file that page accepts.
Get paid
This is the first stage where demo tools quietly stop working. Test three things, in this order.
Payment handling tests
- Record part payment and keep balance open
- Allocate one receipt across several invoices
- Raise deposit then balance invoice crediting it
- Find invoice by payment reference
- Check online payment fees and refunds
- Part payment.Record a payment below the invoice total. The invoice must stay open and show the amount outstanding. A tool that marks it paid is unusable.
- Deposit before the work.Check whether a deposit invoice and the balance invoice can share a job reference and link to each other, or whether you have to remember the link.
- One payment, several invoices.Record a single transfer that settles two invoices in full and part of a third. The tool must split it, leave the third open, and show the remainder as unapplied cash.
Reconcile
- Bank feed or statement import, and matching that suggests rather than assumes.
- Unapplied cash is visible as a category, not hidden.
- Receipts are produced when you want them, not only on request through support.
- A customer statement that lists every open invoice, every payment, every credit, and a closing balance. This is the document that ends disputes, and some tools cannot produce it.
Correct
The stage that separates a bookkeeping tool from a document generator. A correction must not overwrite the document the customer already holds.
Correction and audit checks
- Credit notes numbered and linked to invoice
- Voiding keeps the invoice number in sequence
- Sent invoices cannot be silently edited
- Audit trail shows who changed what and when
- Credit note.Credit one line of a sent invoice. The tool must issue a separate numbered credit note, keep the original intact, and reduce the balance. If editing the sent invoice is the only route, your copy and the customer's no longer match.
- Void.Voiding is a status with a date and a reason, not a delete. The number is not reused.
- The original stays as sent.The sent date, the number, the customer's registered name, and every line must survive the correction. Resending a corrected invoice should produce a new document.
- Audit trail.You should see who changed what and when. The test is to make a correction, export, and check whether the export holds both the original and the credit note.
Archive and leave
Assume you will move tools. Run the export before you commit.
- Every invoice, credit note, and receipt as the document that was sent, in bulk.
- The ledger behind them in a structured filecustomers, invoices, lines, payments, allocations.
- The chase historywhen reminders went and by what channel.
- What happens to the archive if you stop payingread-only, gone, or held for a period. Get it in writing.
- How long records are kept and where they are held, because retention rules for your business are set by your tax authority and not by the vendor. Published guidance on how long to keep records will outlast any vendor's retention default.
What to compare
A like-for-like quote is hard to get, because vendors price on different units. Ask each one the same five questions and put the answers in a row.
- Per user, per month. Seats are the usual unit, and a second bookkeeper usually costs a second seat.
- Per document. Some tools meter invoices, receipts, or signature requests on top of the seat price.
- Payment fees. Card and transfer fees go to the payment provider, not the invoicing tool. Ask who holds the money and when it reaches your bank.
- Setup and migration. Importing customers and opening balances is often a paid day rate.
- Exit. Export at the end can be free, charged, or limited to a format you cannot reuse.
List prices change and differ between the United States and Canada for the same product. Treat any figure as the start of a quote, not a budget. Price the smallest plan that passes the five-step script.
Questions for your accountant first
Ask before you look at any tool: which stages they need access to, whether the tool must feed a particular ledger, how they want tax shown, and what they will need at year-end. Their answer reorders the whole list. A tool your accountant cannot use costs you their time every month.
The same three tests carry over from choosing letter software: change something after the fact, export everything, and count the steps outside the tool. Where invoices start life as accepted quotes, the notes on quoting tools cover the handover from quote to invoice, which is a seam worth testing on its own.
When a spreadsheet is enough
A business sending a handful of invoices a month to customers who pay in full on time does not need the stages above automated. A template, a numbered log, and a folder of as-sent PDFs will serve if you keep the log honestly.
The case for a tool starts when part payments, credit notes, or customer statements become a monthly event. It also starts when figures must flow into a profit and loss form without retyping.
