Billing Manager Blog

One of our guiding principles in building Billing Manager was “help the user get & stay organized”. With that as one of core philosophies - we thought “why don’t we help the user by keeping track of an invoice’s ’state’ - draft, unpaid, overdue…we can take care of it, and it’s one less thing for the user to do”. The last thing we wanted users doing was having to remember to move invoices between folders. So here is an explanation of when and why we move invoices between folders…

1. You save a Draft: When you save a new invoice we put it in the Drafts folder. Our thinking was the Drafts folder is where invoices would live that had not been sent to customers.

2. We move it to Unpaid folder: When you email or print an invoice (a new invoice, or one in the Drafts folder) we move it to the Unpaid folder. Our thinking was if you’re emailing or printing the invoice, then it’s being delivered to the customer.

3. We move it to Paid folder: When your customer pays, our expectation is you’ll record that payment in Billing Manager. When the invoice is paid in full (that is, the recorded payments in Billing Manager are equal to the total amount of the invoice) we move it to the paid folder. I make the distinction about being paid in full because Billing Manager is perfectly happy if you record partial payments - we’ll simply keep track of what is owed (and the invoice will continue to live in the Unpaid folder).

FYI - you can’t record payments against a draft invoice - because our theory is you haven’t delivered it to the customer yet.

4. We move it to Overdue folder: If it’s past the due date on the invoice, and the invoice is not paid in full, we put it in the Overdue folder (and it will still be in the unpaid folder - so you can see everything that’s unpaid (including overdue) in one place).

So, what do you think? Will this logic work for you? So far it seems like most users have appreciated us taking care of this - one less thing to manage in that quest for business organization.

Heather