The selling journey

  1. OptionalQuotationPrice first, accept or decline.
  2. OptionalSales orderInternal confirmation the sale is on.
  3. InvoiceThe official document. Approved, posted, numbered.
  4. PaymentMoney in, applied to one or more invoices.
  5. ReceiptProof of payment for the customer.
Informal step, never on reports Goes through review and approval Issued automatically once payment posts

This page walks through the whole journey on the selling side — from quoting a customer to getting paid and giving them proof of that payment.

A quick note on terms: the Invoice is the official document for a sale — it's what's legally required. A Quotation and Sales Order are just earlier, informal steps before that. And once a customer pays, the Payment Receipt you can give them is a courtesy proof-of-payment — not a tax document itself, and not a replacement for the invoice.

Step 1 (optional): Send a quotation

If a customer wants a price first, go to Quotations and create one — pick the customer, add what you're offering and at what price, and save it as a draft. (If the enquiry came in as a lead, press Create quotation on the lead instead: the customer and the job are filled in and the lead moves to Quoted.)

The tabs at the top of the Quotations page are the to-do list: To prepare (leads waiting for a quote), Ready, not sent, Awaiting response (sent longer than your follow-up cadence) and Expiring this week.

Getting it out the door:

  • Mark ready when the figures are final. A ready quotation is locked — Reopen for editing if something changes.
  • Send by email emails the customer the PDF and a link where they can accept or decline online (they type their name to accept, or a reason to decline). You can add CC addresses and a message; every email is listed under Emails sent with a Resend button. Sending marks the quotation Sent.
  • Mark as sent is for a quote you handed over some other way (printed, messaged).

When they answer: either they do it on the link, or you record it — Customer accepted (you can note who said yes) or Declined (with the reason: the most useful thing to know about lost work). If it's past its validity date, Mark expired; sent quotations past their date also expire by themselves every morning.

Accepting opens a project. With Settings → Organization → Quotations → Open a project when a quotation is accepted on (the default), an accepted quotation creates a project (PRJ-…) with the customer, the job and the quoted total as the budget, and the lead — if there was one — is marked Won. See Projects.

An accepted quotation can then be turned into the next step with one click: Convert to sales order or Convert to invoice, which copies everything over (including the project) so you don't have to retype it.

Reminders. Settings → Organization → Quotations → Nudge about quotations after N days reminds whoever prepared a quote when it has sat ready but unsent, or sent with no answer, for that long. The first unanswered nudge also puts a follow-up task on the quote (CRM → Activities & Follow-ups).

If the deal changes before it's accepted, you have two more options once a quotation is sent, declined, or expired (but not once it's accepted):

  • Revise — keeps the same quotation number but opens a fresh, editable draft, and files the old version away under Previous versions in the quotation so you can still see what was originally offered.
  • Convert without acceptance — for when the sale is going ahead but the customer never formally clicked "accepted" (a verbal go-ahead, for example). You'll be asked to type a short reason, which is kept permanently in the workflow history and audit log, and then it converts to a sales order or invoice like normal.

Step 2 (optional): Sales Order

A Sales Order is just an internal confirmation step before invoicing — useful if you want to track "this sale is happening" separately from "we've officially billed for it." It follows the same send/accept/decline/expire pattern as a quotation (including Revise and Convert without acceptance), and then converts into an Invoice the same way. A Sales Order can only convert to an Invoice, not back to a quotation.

Step 3: Create and send the Invoice

Whether you started from a quotation or sales order or are going straight to billing, go to Invoices → New bill (or use Convert to invoice from an accepted quote/order). Pick the customer, add your line items — tax is calculated for you automatically based on each line.

While it's still a draft you can reopen and edit it freely. The form has both Save as draft and Submit for review buttons — submitting locks the invoice and sends it through the approval steps: Submit → Review → Approve (three different people: the one who submits, a reviewer, and a separate approver — see Approval Workflow). Approving is also the moment it posts to your books and gets its official invoice number.

Once posted, click Send to email the customer a PDF copy — you can resend it anytime, to the same person or someone else, and the invoice list shows a small Sent/Viewed indicator once you have. There's no self-service link a customer can open to view the invoice without logging in — if they need another copy, resend it or download the PDF for them.

Paid on the spot (point of sale): if the customer pays right away — at a counter, in person — tick "Payment collected at the point of sale" on the New Invoice form and choose the account the money went into (cash drawer or bank) and how it was paid. This doesn't skip any checks: nothing reaches your books yet, and the invoice goes through the usual review and approval. Once it's approved and posts, BareLedger automatically drafts the payment in the name of the person who created the invoice (the cashier), matched to that invoice, and sends it for its own review and approval. When that payment is approved, the invoice shows as paid. (There is no longer a one-step "cash sale" that posts everything in one click.)

Step 4: Record the payment

When the customer pays, the quickest way is to open the posted invoice and click Record collection — the form opens with the customer, currency, and the full outstanding amount already filled in. You can also go to Collections → Customer Payments → + New customer payment, pick the customer, choose which account the money landed in, and enter the amount. (Supplier payments have their own page under Purchases → Supplier Payments — the same underlying Payments page just locks to the other direction; a combined, unfiltered view of every payment either way is also always reachable from search and notifications.)

Under Apply to open invoices, choose which invoice(s) this payment covers — a single payment can be split across several invoices, or only partially pay one off if that's what the customer sent.

If the customer pays more than what's owed, a checkbox requires you to confirm turning the extra amount into a customer credit — overpayments are always recorded this way, as a credit the customer can use later, never as a negative balance that just disappears.

You can also attach the proof of payment — a bank transfer slip, check photo, or scanned PDF, up to 10 MB, with a progress bar while it uploads — so the evidence stays with the record.

Save as draft, then run it through Submit → Review → Approve like everything else. The moment it's approved, it's posted, the invoice's balance updates, and — this is the "Official Receipt" step — your Payment Receipt normally appears automatically.

Withholding tax on customer invoices: if your company records creditable withholding tax at invoicing time (the default), the invoice form shows a Withholding tax dropdown and an estimated Withholding (est.) line as you fill it in. If your administrator has switched this to collection time under Settings, you'll instead enter the withholding amount and rate directly on the payment's allocation row when you record the payment. Either way, when a customer later gives you a signed 2307 certificate confirming tax they withheld, record it under Compliance → Withholding Credits (2307) — see Compliance & Tax Filing.

Step 5: Getting the Payment Receipt ("Official Receipt")

For most companies, this happens on its own the instant the payment posts — nothing extra to click. You'll find it by opening the payment and looking at the Payment receipt panel, where you can view its number and download the PDF. (There's also a dedicated Payment Receipts page in the Collections section listing every receipt, so you can reprint an old one anytime.)

If your company has switched receipt issuing to manual, here's how to do it yourself:

  1. An administrator sets this up once, under Settings → Collections → Payment receipts, choosing "Issue manually per payment."
  2. From then on, after a payment posts, open it — you'll see "No receipt issued" with an Issue payment receipt button. Click it.
  3. The receipt appears immediately with its own number, ready to view or download as a PDF.

This same button is also how you'd issue a fresh receipt if an earlier one was voided (for example, after reversing a payment) — it works regardless of your company's automatic/manual setting in that situation.

Understanding the two badges on an invoice

Every posted invoice shows two small pills side by side, and they mean different things:

  • Workflow status — where it is in the approval process: Posted, Reversal requested, Reversed, Void.
  • Settlement badge — how much of it has actually been collected: Payment drafted / Payment in review / Payment reviewed (someone has started recording a payment against it, at that stage), Overdue (past its due date with nothing paid), or the plain collection state — Unpaid, Partially paid, or Paid.

Both badges only appear once the invoice is posted — a draft invoice has neither, because it isn't a real transaction yet.

Credit Notes, Debit Notes, and Customer Credits

These three look similar but do different things:

  • Credit Note — a formal document that reduces what a customer owes, for example a return or a pricing correction. The fastest way to create one is to open a posted invoice and click Create credit note — it pre-fills the customer, currency, exchange rate, and every line from that invoice, and shows a banner confirming which invoice it's crediting. Like an invoice, it goes through Submit → Review → Approve before it affects anything.
  • Debit Note — the opposite: it adds an extra charge on top of an already-issued invoice (for example, a shipping fee you forgot to bill). Same approval steps as an invoice.
  • Customer Credit — not something you create directly. It's an automatic ledger record — a "customer advance" — generated when a payment overpays its invoices, or when you deliberately hold an unallocated amount. Find these under Collections → Customer Credits, where you can Apply to invoice (use it against a future invoice), Refund it back to the customer, or Void it (only while nothing has been applied yet). Applying and refunding don't happen immediately: each one creates a sign-off request that a reviewer and then a different approver must okay under Collections → Credit Approvals — only then does it reach your books. While a request is pending you can change its amount or withdraw it, and a credit can have only one open request at a time.

On an invoice's Payment summary panel, both credit notes and applied customer credits show up as their own line items, alongside any actual payments, so you can always see exactly what reduced the balance and how.

Common mix-ups

  • Trying to reverse an invoice that already has a payment on it — undo the payment first.
  • Expecting a quotation or sales order to show up on a financial report — they never do; only invoices, credit notes, and debit notes count as posted transactions.
  • Assuming the Payment Receipt is the "real" tax document — the Invoice always is; the receipt is just proof the customer paid.
  • Confusing a Credit Note (something you create and approve) with a Customer Credit (something the system creates automatically from an overpayment) — see above.