Invoices and taking payment later

A receipt is a document about money you have already taken. An invoice is a request for money you are still owed. Raise one whenever the patient is not paying at the desk: a prescribed course, an insurance or corporate account, or a treatment agreed today and paid before the next visit.

Drafts and issued invoices

Every invoice starts as a draft. Drafts are free: edit the lines, change the amounts, delete the whole thing. Nothing is numbered and nothing is owed.

When it is right, click Issue invoice. That is the moment the invoice becomes a document: it takes the next invoice number, the lines freeze, and the total is fixed. Invoice numbers run in their own series (INV-00001 upwards), separate from your receipt numbers, and they never gap.

Because issued lines are frozen, a mistake is corrected by voiding the invoice and raising a new one rather than editing it. That is deliberate: the document the patient was sent must always read the same.

Raising one

• From a visit. Open the appointment in the diary and click Create invoice in the Payment panel. The treatment and any discount are filled in for you.
• Freehand. From the patient record, click New invoice. You can also start one from Finance, Receipts, Invoices and pick the patient there. Then type the lines yourself.

Each line can be marked medical or cosmetic for VAT, and one invoice can mix the two. A consultation plus a product is the normal case, which is exactly why the lines are separate.

The pay link

Every issued invoice has its own private pay link. Press Copy pay link on the invoice page and send it however you already talk to the patient. It opens a clean copy of the invoice with a Pay button, and the card payment goes straight to your clinic. When a card payment goes through, the invoice marks itself paid and the payment gets its own receipt number as normal. If your Stripe account offers other payment methods, such as Direct Debit or bank transfer, the patient may see those too; the invoice is then only marked paid once the money actually arrives, which can take a few working days.

A patient who has registered for the portal sees up to 50 unpaid invoices under Invoices to pay, ordered by due date, with a View and pay button. Your receipts shows receipts for their 24 most recent successful or refunded payments that have receipt numbers.

Money taken any other way goes on with Record payment on the invoice page, choosing Cash, Card (terminal), Bank transfer or Account credit.

The pay link accounts for payments already awaiting bank settlement and offers only the remainder. It reuses an open checkout rather than creating another for the same balance. Before recording a separate payment, check Stripe for any payment still processing.

If a pay link has been sent to the wrong person or needs replacing, an owner or someone with Finance access can press New payment link. The old link stops working immediately. Send the replacement to the patient.

Part-payments

You do not have to take the whole amount at once. Record whatever was paid and the invoice stays open with the balance showing. It flips to Paid by itself the moment the balance reaches zero. If a card payment is later refunded in Stripe, or a recorded payment is reversed with Correct a payment, the balance reopens.

Seeing what is owed

Go to Finance, Receipts and switch to the Invoices tab. Drafts sit on top, then issued invoices newest first, with the total still outstanding across everything issued. Anything past its due date is highlighted as Overdue. Chasing is a click: open it and copy the pay link.

Voiding versus refunding

These are two different things and the app keeps them apart:

• Use Void invoice and give a reason for an issued invoice that nobody has paid: raised in error, wrong patient, treatment not going ahead. It keeps its number and stays in the ledger marked void, so your numbering never gaps.
• Refund when money has actually moved. A paid invoice cannot be voided. Refund a card payment from your own Stripe dashboard; for cash or a bank transfer, a clinic owner records it on the Finance page with the Type Refund. A refund recorded that way is not linked back to the invoice, so it stays marked paid; make a note on the patient's record. That keeps the honest trail your accountant needs.

The case this was built for

Weight management, and anything else where the consultation and the treatment are separate events. The patient is seen today and the consultation is paid as usual. The prescribed treatment is invoiced with a due date, the patient gets the pay link, and the money is collected before they come back. Nothing sits in a notebook, and the unpaid list tells you exactly who has not paid.

Where invoices live

Invoices sit beside receipts in Finance, because they are two halves of the same ledger: money asked for, and money taken. Each payment against an invoice still gets its own receipt, and the invoice lists those receipts.

An invoice has one open online checkout at a time. Reopening its payment link reuses that checkout. If a payment is still pending, wait for its result before collecting the same balance again. A paid invoice's link is retired after 30 days.

The issued invoice list is paged in groups of 100. The outstanding total covers all issued invoices, not just the current page.