Raising an invoice

The old way of billing a cleaning round is to sit down on a Sunday with a diary and try to remember what got done. The failure mode is not fraud, it is forgetting: a job goes in, gets cleaned, and never appears on a bill. CleanFlo closes that gap by linking each completed job to the invoice that billed it, and showing you everything that is not linked yet.

The Invoicing screen

The page is titled Invoicing with the subtitle Manage billing and track payments, and it has two tabs: Invoices and Settings. Everything in this guide happens on the first. The second is where your bank details and invoice branding live, and it is worth setting up before you raise anything.

The ledger below has six columns: Invoice, Client, Amount, Timeline, Status and Actions. Timeline is two stacked lines, Issued: over Due:, and the due line turns red once the invoice is late. Actions carries View on every row and Edit only on drafts, because a sent invoice is a document somebody already has.

The four statuses

Raising one from completed jobs

When a job is marked Done and has a client and a price on it, CleanFlo puts it into the uninvoiced pool. The amber banner above the ledger is that pool, grouped by client. Collapsed, it reads as one line: the number of jobs, the number of clients and the total sitting there.

The invoice form, field by field

Whether you arrived by Invoice Now or by Create Invoice in the header, you get the same drawer: New Invoice, subtitled Create a new invoice for a client.

Changing the client after lines have been written clears the lines and starts again, which is deliberate: you should never end up billing one client for another client's work because you changed the dropdown halfway through.

The line editor

The line editor is a small spreadsheet. Its header row reads Description, Qty, Unit Price, VAT % and Total, followed by an unlabelled column holding the delete buttons. The VAT % column is only drawn when your company is marked as VAT registered, and when it is, the section label carries a badge reading VAT registered · rates per item.

• Description is free text, placeholder Item description. A line with no description is silently dropped when you save, which is how the blank last row disappears rather than becoming a £0.00 line.
• Qty takes decimals as well as whole numbers, placeholder 1. Useful for hours.
• Unit Price is the price of one, placeholder 0.00. It is a net figure when you are VAT registered.
• VAT % is per line, placeholder 20. Every new line starts at 20 if you are VAT registered and 0 if you are not.
• Total is calculated and cannot be typed into. It is the quantity times the unit price, plus that line's own VAT.

Add line item at the foot adds a blank row. The bin icon at the end of a row removes it, except when there is only one row left: an invoice always keeps at least one line in the editor. Underneath, the running totals read Subtotal, VAT and, in bold, Total. Note that the drawer says Total where the printed document says Total Due: same number, different audience.

Saving, and where the number comes from

The footer holds three buttons: Cancel, Create Draft and Create & Send. On an invoice you are editing there is only one, Save Changes.

Both create buttons write the invoice as a draft first. Create & Send then emails it and only promotes it to Sent once the email provider has accepted the message. If the email fails, the invoice survives as a draft and you are told so plainly: Invoice saved as a draft — we could not email it to Marcus Hale. Open it and use Send Invoice to try again. Nothing is lost and nothing pretends to have gone out.

Four things are checked before it saves, and the drawer jumps to the first field that fails: Please select a client., Please enter a recipient name., Please enter a recipient email. and Add at least one line item with a description.

The invoice number is generated by the database when the invoice is first saved, never by you and never editable afterwards. Its shape is a prefix, the year, and a three-digit sequence: the first invoice you raise in 2026 is INV-2026-001, the second is INV-2026-002, and the count starts again at 001 in January. The prefix defaults to INV and can be changed under Invoicing → Settings, which is how a firm running two trading names keeps two series apart.