Sending and chasing an invoice

Opening an invoice from the ledger replaces the whole screen with the invoice itself. The sidebar and the table go, and you get a breadcrumb back to Invoices, a row of buttons, and the printed document beneath. Which buttons you get depends entirely on the status.

Sending it

Send Invoice does exactly what it says and nothing more. There is no send dialog. You do not write a subject line, you do not compose a covering message, you do not pick a recipient and you do not get a preview-before-send: the recipient is the contact email on the client record, or the email you typed if the invoice went to a one-off recipient.

The order matters. The email goes out first and the status is written second, so an invoice only reads Sent once it really has been. Three things can happen.

If you used Create & Send in the drawer rather than opening the invoice afterwards, the same sequence runs. It creates the invoice as a draft, emails it, and only then promotes it. A failure there leaves you with a saved draft and a message telling you to open it and use Send Invoice.

Getting a PDF

Print / PDF is on the action bar at every status. It calls your browser's own print dialog against the document on screen, and every modern browser offers "Save as PDF" as a destination in that dialog. There is no server-side PDF, no download button and no control over the filename.

The print stylesheet strips the app away: white page, no shadow, no rounded corners, the paper stretched to the full width. What comes out is the document and nothing else. That is the file to attach when somebody asks you to resend, or to keep for your own records.

Knowing where everything is

The ledger is the tracker. The Status column carries the pill, the Timeline column carries both dates, and an invoice past its due date is marked in three ways at once: the pill turns red, the Due: line turns red, and the whole row takes a faint red wash.

Above the table, the status filters read All, Draft, Sent, Paid and Overdue. The one worth pressing on a Monday morning is Overdue.

What Overdue means, and when it flips

Overdue is not something you set and not something anybody presses. It is worked out fresh every time a screen draws, from one comparison: the invoice is Sent, it has a due date, and that due date is before today. Nothing else counts.

• A draft is never overdue, however old it is. It has not been issued, so nothing is late.
• A paid invoice is never overdue, even if it was paid three weeks after the due date. Paid is the end of the line.
• A sent invoice with no due date at all can never go overdue. It also cannot be chased with a reminder, because there is nothing to count from.
• An invoice flips at the turn of the day. Due on the 31st means it is still fine on the 31st, and overdue from the moment the 1st starts.

Because it is computed rather than stored, the same invoice reads the same on the ledger, in the exported CSV and on the printed document. There is no background job you are waiting for and no state to get out of sync.

Chasing, politely

When anything is overdue, a second button appears in the page header beside Create Invoice, outlined in red and counting what is waiting: Send 1 Reminder, or Send 3 Reminders, and so on.

Pressing it asks first: Send a payment reminder to 3 clients? with the buttons Cancel and Send reminders. Each reminder carries the invoice number, the issue and due dates, the total, how many days late it is, and your bank details, so the client has everything they need to pay without replying to ask.

An invoice is only eligible if it has both a client email address and a due date. Without a due date there is no honest way to say how overdue it is, so those invoices are skipped. If nothing at all qualifies, the dialog does not open and you get the reason instead: No overdue invoices have both a client email and a due date on file.

You can also chase one at a time. Open an overdue invoice and the action bar carries Send Reminder beside Mark as Paid. Same email, one client. Two things can stop it, and both say so plainly: There is no client email address on file. and This invoice has no due date, so we cannot say how overdue it is.

The automatic overdue chase ladder

Beyond the buttons you press yourself, CleanFlo also chases automatically. A background run checks every overdue invoice once a day and, the moment one reaches 7, 14 or 30 days overdue, emails the client without you doing anything. It is not a fourth reminder bolted on top of the ones above: it uses the same reminder shape, sent for you, on a schedule you do not have to remember.

There are three stages and each fires once. The copy escalates as the debt ages, and every stage carries the same information a manual reminder does — the invoice number, the issue and due dates, the total, how many days late it is, and your bank details — because the client still has to be able to pay from the email alone.

If a client has more than one invoice reaching a stage in the same run, they do not get several emails landing at once. CleanFlo combines everything that is due into a single statement email, listing every overdue invoice with its own total and days late, rather than three near-identical emails arriving in the same inbox within a second of each other.

Two switches control it, one for the company and one for a single client.

Statutory interest and compensation

For an overdue invoice to a business — not a private individual — CleanFlo can work out what you are legally entitled to charge under the Late Payment of Commercial Debts legislation: statutory interest on the debt, plus a fixed compensation amount. Consumer invoices never show this, because the entitlement does not exist for them.

The interest is the Bank of England base rate plus a fixed 8%, run over however many days the invoice has been overdue. CleanFlo cannot look the base rate up for you — it moves, and there is no live feed to it — so it lives as a company-level setting under Invoicing → Settings, defaulting to 4.75%. Check it against the real figure occasionally and update it there; the calculation is only ever as current as what you have typed in.

Alongside the interest, the legislation adds a fixed compensation amount that steps up with the size of the debt: £40 under £1,000, £70 from £1,000 up to £10,000, and £100 at £10,000 or more.

Once a business invoice is overdue, a banner appears on the invoice itself with the calculated figure and an Add to Invoice button. Press it and CleanFlo writes the whole calculation onto the invoice as a single new line, described as statutory interest and compensation — one line, one figure, not a separate interest field and a separate compensation field.

Once added, the banner stops recalculating. What it shows from that point on is the figure that was actually charged, frozen at the moment you pressed the button, not a live number climbing with every extra day late. That is deliberate: recalculating against a total that already includes the interest you added would start charging interest on the interest, which the legislation does not intend and is not something you want to be doing.

Getting paid online: the Pay Now link

An invoice can also carry its own payment link, sitting on the page beside the BACS block rather than replacing it.

Whichever is set, the printed and emailed invoice both grow a Pay Now button next to the payment details, and so does the same invoice in the client portal. Nothing about the BACS block moves or shrinks to make way for it: a client who prefers to transfer the money still can, and one who would rather click through and pay online still can. It is additive, not a replacement.

The copy next to the button says plainly what CleanFlo is and is not doing: You'll be taken to {company}'s own payment page to pay. CleanFlo does not process this payment and cannot see when it's been made. That is accurate wording, not cautious wording. The link is whatever payment page you already have — a Stripe payment link, a PayPal.me address, a GoCardless mandate page, anything — and CleanFlo has no payment processing of its own built in. It hands the client a URL and nothing else. You still press Mark as Paid yourself, once the money is actually in the account, exactly as before.

Recording a payment

This is the shortest section in this manual, because there is almost nothing to it. Open the invoice and press Mark as Paid.

That is the whole feature. There is no confirmation, no payment dialog and no form of any kind. CleanFlo does not ask for an amount, a date, a method or a reference. There is no Amount paid field, no Balance due field, no part payment, no payment plan and no allocation of a lump sum across several invoices. An invoice is either paid or it is not.

Pressing it does four things. The status becomes Paid and the pill turns green. A short confirmation reads Invoice marked as paid. The invoice drops out of Outstanding and joins Paid (30 Days). And a notification titled Invoice paid is pushed to the company account, so whoever is not sitting at the screen still hears about it.

For a part payment, the practical approach is to leave the invoice where it is and treat the balance as the thing you are chasing. The invoice number is the payment reference on the document, so a partial BACS payment still reconciles against it in your bank feed; CleanFlo just does not model the split.

The Outstanding figure

Outstanding is the sum of every invoice that has not been paid: drafts, sent invoices and overdue ones together. It is the first of the four figures on the Invoicing screen and it also sits on the dashboard, second from the left, so it is usually the first number you see in a day.

Because drafts count towards it, Outstanding also catches the invoice you wrote on Friday and forgot to send. If the figure looks wrong, filter the ledger to Draft before you go looking anywhere else: an unsent invoice is money you have not actually asked for.

Two habits keep the number meaningful. Mark payments off the same week they arrive, so Paid (30 Days) reflects reality and Outstanding is not carrying money you already have. And press Export CSV beside the pager once a month: it writes invoices.csv from whatever the ledger is currently filtered to, with the invoice number, client, amount, both dates and the status, which is the file your bookkeeper will ask for anyway.