Invoices

Invoices let the church bill someone for a charge — hall hire, a venue fee, a camp fee — by creating a draft, then emailing it or delivering it yourself as a PDF. An invoice can go to a church member (picked from People) or to a saved customer (an outside person or organisation, such as a community group that hires the hall). Customers are kept separate from People, so they never appear in the member directory, member counts or member emails.

Using it

Customers

Accounting → Customers (/accounting/customers) lists saved outside customers. ADMIN/PASTOR can add, edit and deactivate them; customers are never deleted, because invoices refer to them. You can also add a customer on the spot from the invoice form’s recipient picker (+ New customer).

Creating an invoice

Accounting → Invoices → New invoice opens a draft:

Recipient — search members and customers in one box, or leave it blank and type a name. Picking a member fills in their email and their family’s address; picking a customer fills in the saved details. You can edit the copied details on the draft — the invoice keeps its own copy, so later changes to the member or customer don’t alter invoices already issued.
Issue and due dates, the income account the payment will be recorded against, and an optional fund.
Lines — description, quantity (whole number) and unit price. Totals update as you type; the server recalculates them when you save.
Notes — printed on the invoice.

A draft can be edited or deleted freely. It has no number yet.

GST and tax invoices

If the church is registered for GST, an ADMIN turns on The church is registered for GST under Accounting → Accounting Settings → Invoices. New invoices then become Tax Invoices: prices are entered excluding GST, each line has a GST tick-box (10%), and the PDF shows the church’s ABN, a GST column, the GST total and the GST-inclusive total. A tax invoice needs the church name, address and ABN set under Settings → Church Information.

The same settings card holds Payment details (for example bank account and reference instructions), printed under “How to pay” on every invoice.

Whether an invoice is a tax invoice is fixed when it is sent — its GST and totals are recalculated from the lines at that moment — so changing the GST setting later never alters an invoice already issued. While still a draft, an invoice always shows totals for the current setting.

Sending

From an invoice’s page, a draft can be:

Send by email — numbers the invoice, locks it, and emails the PDF to the recipient. If the email fails, the invoice still counts as sent (the email may have got through before the error), so use Re-send to try again or deliver it yourself.
Mark as sent (I’ll deliver it) — numbers and locks the invoice without emailing, for invoices you print, post or hand over.

A sent invoice can be re-sent by email at any time. Sent invoices can’t be edited.

The PDF is saved, encrypted, when an invoice is sent, on a best-effort basis: if saving fails, the invoice is still sent and each later download or re-send tries to save it again. Downloads of a sent, paid or voided invoice, and re-sends of a sent one, give you that exact file, so uploading or resetting the letterhead later never changes an invoice already issued. For invoices sent before this was added, or whose copy could not be saved, the first download or re-send tries to save a copy, so those use the letterhead at that moment. A copy is never saved if the invoice’s stored issuer details are unreadable; those invoices are always rebuilt using the current letterhead and settings. If a saved copy can’t be read, the invoice is rebuilt from its stored details instead (and the saved copy is left untouched). Drafts always show the current letterhead.

Marking an invoice paid

When the money arrives, open the sent invoice and choose Mark paid. Payment is recorded in full — part-payments aren’t supported. You have two options:

Link existing transaction — if the payment is already in your transactions (for example from a bank-statement import), pick it from the list. The list only shows income transactions for exactly the invoice total, dated on or after the issue date and outside any locked period, that aren’t giving and aren’t already linked to another invoice. Linking moves the transaction to the invoice’s income account and fund, so invoice income is always reported the same way however it was recorded.
Record new payment — enter the payment date and the bank account it went into. This creates an income transaction for the invoice total, posted to the invoice’s income account and fund, with the invoice number as its reference.

Tick Email the recipient that payment was received to send a short “payment received” note for the invoice to its email address. It is not a donation receipt — invoice payments are for goods or services, not gifts. If the email can’t be sent, the invoice is still marked paid and the page tells you why.

The payment can’t be dated before the invoice was issued, or fall in a locked accounting period. A paid invoice links to its payment transaction.

Unmark paid puts the invoice back to sent. The payment transaction stays in your books, just no longer linked to the invoice (a linked transaction keeps the invoice’s account and fund). While a transaction is an invoice’s payment, its amount, date, type, account and fund can’t be changed and it can’t be deleted — unmark the invoice first, then edit or delete it from Transactions.

Voiding

A sent invoice that should never have been issued can be voided with a reason (for example “Duplicate” or “Wrong customer”). The number stays used, so the sequence has no gaps, and the invoice can no longer be paid or re-sent. To correct an invoice, void it and create a new one. A paid invoice must be unmarked before it can be voided. Drafts aren’t voided — delete them instead.

Totals and GST collected

Above the invoice list:

Outstanding — the total of all sent, unpaid invoices.
Paid — invoices marked paid in the period.
GST collected — the GST on invoices paid in the period (shown only when the church is registered for GST). Use it as the invoice part of your BAS. It is cash basis: an invoice’s GST counts in the period it was paid, not when it was issued. The ledger holds the GST-inclusive amount in the income account.

The period is the Issued from / to filter dates when both are set, otherwise the current month.

Finding older invoices

The invoice list shows 50 invoices per page, newest issue date first. Use Previous and Next under the table to move between pages; the Status and Issued from / to filters stay applied as you page. The totals above the list do not depend on which page you are viewing.

Numbering

Invoices are numbered INV-0001, INV-0002, … in the order they are sent. Numbers are only given out when an invoice is sent or marked as sent, so deleting drafts never leaves gaps.

PDF download

Download PDF on an invoice’s page saves the invoice as a PDF (INV-0001.pdf). Drafts can be downloaded too, marked with a large “DRAFT” watermark. Every download is recorded in the audit log.

Who can do what

Action	ADMIN	PASTOR	OFFICE_ADMIN	AUDITOR	VIEWER / EVENT_ORGANISER
View invoices and customers	Yes	Yes	Yes	Names, lines and totals only	No
See recipient email, phone and address	Yes	Yes	Yes	No	No
Download invoice PDF	Yes	Yes	Yes	No	No
Create, edit, send invoices; manage customers	Yes	Yes	No	No	No
Mark paid / unmark, void invoices	Yes	Yes	No	No	No
Change GST / payment-details settings	Yes	No	No	No	No

How it works

Invoice and Customer models (prisma/schema.prisma). Recipient email/address and invoice notes, and customer email/phone/address/notes, are encrypted at rest — see Data Encryption.
Money is held in integer cents while calculating; each GST line’s GST is 10% of its line total, rounded to the cent. Totals are always computed on the server.
Status moves DRAFT → SENT → PAID (or SENT → VOID); PAID → SENT when unmarked. Each change is checked against the expected current status, so two people acting on the same invoice at once can’t both succeed.
A payment is the income Transaction whose invoiceId points at the invoice (at most one per invoice). Marking paid flips the status and links or creates the transaction in one database transaction.
The list pages with keyset cursors (?after= / ?before=, each YYYY-MM-DD_id, or <ISO timestamp>_id when an issue date carries a time) over issueDate desc, id desc, so paging stays fast and stable as invoices are added. A malformed cursor is ignored and shows the first page; after takes precedence over before even when malformed.
Every create, update, send, payment, unmark, void, delete and PDF download is written to the audit log.