Invoices

An invoice in PulseBooks is a real accounting document: issuing it posts to your ledger, and every later change is recorded. This page covers the whole lifecycle.

The lifecycle

An invoice moves through these statuses:

• Draft — editable, and not yet in your books. Drafts are the only invoices that can be deleted.
• Sent — you issued it. PulseBooks posts the receivable and income to your ledger, emails the client, and the invoice becomes immutable except through payments, credit notes, or cancellation.
• Viewed — the client opened their portal link.
• Partially paid / Paid — as payments are recorded against it.
• Overdue — past its due date with a balance outstanding.
• Cancelled — a terminal state for an invoice that should never be collected. The ledger posting is reversed; the document and its history remain.

Sending is always a human action: you review the recipient and click Send in PulseBooks. A connected AI assistant can prepare drafts, but it cannot issue, send, or pass on a payment link — see Connect your AI assistant.

Creating an invoice

Go to Invoices → New. Pick a client (or create one inline), add line items — free-typed or from your product list — set the dates, and save. Numbering is automatic and sequential; you can adjust the format under Settings → Invoices, along with your default payment terms, notes, and banking details shown on the PDF.

Invoices can be issued in a foreign currency; the ledger records both the invoice currency and your base currency using the exchange rate at issue. See Multi-currency.

The client portal

Every sent invoice carries a secure portal link where your client can view the invoice and download the PDF — no account needed. The link is long, random, and revocable:

• Regenerate portal link invalidates the old link and mints a new one.
• Revoke portal link turns the portal off for that invoice entirely.

Both live on the invoice page's actions menu.

Recording payments

Record a payment from the invoice page: amount, date, and the account it arrived in. Partial payments are fine — the invoice tracks its balance due and moves to Partially paid until settled. A payment recorded in error can be reversed, which removes the payment and its ledger entry together.

If you reconcile bank statements, matching a statement line to an invoice records the payment for you — see Reconciliation.

Deposits and pro forma invoices

For work you invoice before delivering, PulseBooks supports pro forma invoices: a payment request that is explicitly not a tax invoice (the PDF says so), so nothing is recognised as income when you send it. Money received against a pro forma sits as a client deposit (deferred income) until you allocate it.

When the work is done, raise the real tax invoice and allocate the deposit to it: the invoice shows the total, the deposit applied, and the balance due, and the ledger moves the deposit from deferred income to revenue. Unallocated deposits are listed under Invoices → Unapplied deposits.

Reminders

For an outstanding invoice, Send reminder on the invoice page emails the client a nudge with the portal link. Reminders are always sent by you, on demand — PulseBooks does not email your clients automatically, and neither can a connected assistant.

Duplicating, credit notes, and corrections

• Duplicate copies an invoice into a fresh draft.
• A sent invoice with a mistake is corrected with a credit note or by cancelling it — never by silent editing. That is what keeps the audit trail honest.

Peppol UBL export

On the Business plan, any invoice can be downloaded as Peppol BIS Billing 3.0 UBL XML from the invoice page — a machine-readable e-invoice file for clients and systems that accept UBL. PulseBooks generates the file for you to deliver; it does not transmit invoices over the Peppol network itself.