Recurring

For a monthly retainer, an annual subscription or a weekly service fee, you should not be retyping the same document every period. The Recurring page holds templates of three kinds — recurring invoices, recurring bills and recurring expenses — and a scheduled job generates the real documents when they fall due. Recurring templates are available on every plan.

Schedules

Every template carries the same schedule fields:

• Frequency — weekly, monthly, quarterly or yearly, optionally every N periods (e.g. every 2 weeks).
• Start date — the first run. Each generated document is dated on its scheduled date.
• End date — optional. Leave it empty to run until paused; set it and the template deactivates itself once the date has passed.

Recurring invoice and bill templates additionally carry payment days: each generated document's due date is its scheduled date plus that many days.

Monthly-style schedules keep their day of the month sensibly: a template that runs on the 31st runs on the last day of shorter months instead of drifting.

What gets generated, and when

A scheduled job runs once a day and processes every active template that has come due. Documents are dated on their scheduled date, not on the day the job happened to run, so a late run still produces correctly dated paperwork. If generation was unavailable across several due dates, one catch-up document is generated and the schedule moves on to the next future date — you will not find a pile of duplicates.

What each kind produces:

• Recurring invoices generate a draft invoice: the template's client, line items (which can come from your product catalogue), currency, discount, notes, terms and PO number, with the due date set from the payment days on the template. Nothing is sent — you review the draft and send it yourself, exactly like any other invoice. The template can also name a bank account, whose payment details are stamped onto each generated invoice.
• Recurring bills generate a draft bill for the supplier, with the template's category applied to its lines. The draft carries a deliberately provisional bill number — the supplier's real invoice number is unknown until their document arrives, so replace it when you approve the bill. Approval, the step that puts a bill into your books, is always yours.
• Recurring expenses generate a real, recorded expense — not a draft. The transaction is posted to your books on its scheduled date, with the template's amount, currency, category, vendor and supplier link. If a scheduled date falls inside a period you have already closed, that occurrence is skipped rather than posted into the closed period — see Period close.

Every generated document is an ordinary record afterwards: draft invoices and bills can be edited before they go out, and each one keeps a link back to the template that produced it.

Creating a template

From the Recurring page, choose New Recurring Invoice, New Recurring Bill or New Recurring Expense:

• A recurring invoice template looks like an invoice form: client, line items, discounts, notes, terms, plus the schedule and payment days.
• A recurring bill template names the supplier, the line items and a category, plus the schedule. The supplier and currency are fixed once created — a different supplier is a different arrangement, so make it a different template.
• A recurring expense template is a single amount with a category, description, vendor and currency, plus the schedule.

All three kinds can be set up in a foreign currency; the template's currency and exchange rate are carried onto every document it generates. See Multi-currency.

Pausing, editing and deleting

Each template on the Recurring page shows whether it is Active or Paused, when it runs next, and how many documents it has generated.

• Pause stops future generation immediately; Resume picks the schedule back up. Nothing already generated is affected. If a resumed template's next run date has already passed, the next daily run generates a single catch-up document dated on that scheduled date and then moves the schedule forward.
• Edit is available on recurring invoice and expense templates — change the lines, the amounts or the schedule and the next run uses the new values. Documents already generated keep the values they were created with.
• Delete removes the template and stops future generation. Invoices, bills and expenses it already generated are kept — deleting the template never touches your books.

A template with an end date pauses itself once the date has passed, so a fixed-term arrangement winds down without you having to remember it.