How to raise 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 clean goes in, gets cleaned, and never appears on a bill. CleanFlo closes that gap by linking each completed clean 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.

Outstanding

Everything invoiced and not yet paid: drafts, sent invoices and overdue ones added together. The single number most owners check first thing.

Overdue

The part of Outstanding that is past its due date. Red, because it should be.

Paid (30 Days)

Money that has actually landed in the last thirty days, measured from when you marked each invoice paid.

Uninvoiced work

Completed cleans with no invoice attached. This is money you have earned and not yet asked for, which makes it the most interesting figure on the page.

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

Draft

Written but not issued. The only status you can still edit or delete, and the status every new invoice is created at, even the ones you create with Create & Send.

Sent

The email went out and the provider accepted it, or you issued it another way and there was no address on file. From here the invoice is a document in somebody else's inbox.

Paid

You pressed Mark as Paid. It comes off Outstanding and joins Paid (30 Days).

Overdue

Sent, unpaid, and past the due date. Never stored: the app compares the due date with today every time it draws the pill, so an invoice becomes overdue at midnight without anybody running anything.

Raising one from completed cleans

When a clean 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 cleans, the number of clients and the total sitting there.

The invoice form, field by field

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

Bill To

A two-button toggle: Existing Client or New Recipient. The first gives you a dropdown of your active clients. The second gives you a Name and an Email, for a one-off you are not keeping on the books.

The uninvoiced cleans notice

Only in create mode, only with an existing client selected. While it looks: Checking for uninvoiced cleans…. When it finds some: 4 completed cleans auto-added: £624.00 total over Edit or remove any lines below. When it finds none: No completed cleans waiting to be invoiced: add line items manually below.

Issue Date

Defaults to today. This is the date printed on the document, and for VAT purposes it is normally your tax point.

Due Date

Defaults to today plus your default payment terms. This is the date the Overdue status is worked out from, so it is not decoration: leave it blank and the invoice can never go overdue and can never be chased with a reminder.

Line Items

The invoice itself. Described below.

Notes

Optional. Free text, printed under its own Notes heading on the document. The placeholder suggests Payment terms, internal notes…, and it is worth remembering that anything you put here is on the copy the client receives.

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.

Edit the lines

The Lines section works like a small spreadsheet: what the work was, the quantity, the unit price, the VAT rate if you are VAT registered, and the line total. Lines written from finished cleans arrive already filled in, and every one of them can be changed.

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 page 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.