Bank details and invoice branding

The split is not arbitrary. Settings → Company holds facts about the business: its name, address, phone number, company number, whether it is VAT registered and its VAT number. Invoicing → Settings holds everything about the document: how it looks, what it says at the bottom, and how somebody pays it.

What is on the tab

Five cards, top to bottom, with one save bar at the foot that covers all of them.

The BACS block

This is the card to fill in first, because CleanFlo will not let you raise an invoice without it. Until both required fields are saved, the card carries a red badge reading Required to create invoices, an amber gate appears above the invoice ledger reading BACS payment details required, and both Create Invoice and Invoice Now bounce you back here instead of opening the drawer.

Each of the four is only printed when it has a value, so a half-filled block does not leave empty labels on the page. What is always printed, whatever else is missing, is the reference.

The payment reference

At the bottom of the BACS block sits a fifth row you never fill in: Reference, holding the invoice number. Under the grid, one sentence spells it out, with the number in bold: Please quote INV-2026-004 as the payment reference so we can match your payment to this invoice.

It looks redundant. The invoice number is already unique, and it is already printed at the top of the page beside the word INVOICE. The reason it appears twice is that until it was labelled as the reference, nobody quoted it. A client would look at the bank details, type your sort code and account number into their banking app, put "cleaning" in the reference box, and send the money. It arrived, and there was no way to tell which invoice it was for.

That is the whole mechanism. There is no payment link, no card processing, no direct debit and no bank feed inside CleanFlo. Matching a BACS payment to an invoice is a human reading their bank statement, and the reference is what makes that possible in seconds rather than by comparing amounts.

Templates, colour and logo

The first card on the tab is Template & Branding, subtitled Choose how your invoices look when printed or sent to clients. It offers three layouts, shown as small thumbnails you can pick between.

The Preview button in the corner of the card opens a modal headed Template Preview showing your choices applied to a dummy invoice with two line items, so you can see the effect before you save. It does not use one of your real invoices.

Defaults and display options

Two smaller cards sit between the branding and the bank details. Document Defaults is subtitled Pre-filled values used when creating new invoices, and it decides what a new invoice starts with rather than changing anything that already exists.

• Invoice number prefix, up to ten characters, defaulting to INV. Change it to CLN and your next invoice is CLN-2026-005. The year and the sequence are not yours to set.
• Currency symbol, picked from £, $, €, A$, C$ and CHF. It changes the symbol everywhere money is shown, including the CSV export headers.
• Default payment terms, one of 7, 14, 21, 30, 60 or 90 days. This is what the Due Date on a new invoice is calculated from. The default is 14 days.

Turning Show quantity column off removes Qty from the printed document only. It stays in the editor and the arithmetic is unchanged: four visits at £130 is still £520 net, it is just presented as one figure rather than as four of something.

The invoice footer

The last card is Invoice Footer. One optional textarea, whose placeholder suggests e.g. Thank you for your business. Payment terms: 14 days. Whatever you type prints centred in small italics at the foot of every invoice, above a hairline rule, and on every quote as well.

There is no built-in thank-you line anywhere in CleanFlo. If your invoices are to say anything friendly at the bottom, this is the only field that will say it. It is also the sensible home for anything that has to appear on every document: your company registration number, a late-payment clause, a note that all cleaners are DBS checked, or a reverse-charge wording your accountant has given you.

When you are done, the save bar at the foot of the tab has two buttons: Discard, which puts everything back to how it was when the page loaded, and Save changes. A tick and the word Saved appears beside them when it lands. Nothing on this tab saves as you type.

The one thing that is somewhere else

Your VAT number is not on this tab. It lives with the rest of your company identity, on Settings → Company, behind a switch labelled VAT registered. Turn the switch on and a VAT number field appears beneath it, with the placeholder GB123456789.

Two conditions have to be met before it prints. The company must be marked as VAT registered, and a number must be stored. Meet both and a line reading VAT No: followed by your number appears under your address on every invoice and every quote, in all three templates. Miss either and the line is simply not drawn, with no warning.

The same split applies to your address and phone number, which also print on the document and are also edited on the Company tab. If your header looks wrong, that is where to go. If the bottom half of the page looks wrong, you are in the right place here.