Script below.

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Welcome to the NZRT Wiki Podcast. Today we’re looking at Customer Invoices & Credit Notes.

If you’ve ever needed to bill a client, track what they owe, or reverse a charge, this is the part of the system you’ll be working in. Customer invoices and credit notes sit at the heart of your accounts receivable process, and once you understand how they fit together, the whole thing becomes much more intuitive.

Let’s start with the types of invoices available to you, because not every billing situation is the same.

There are four invoice types. The first is a Standard invoice. This is your everyday sales invoice — you’ve delivered a product or a service, and now you’re asking the customer to pay for it. Most of what you do day to day will fall into this category.

The second type is a Credit Note. Think of this as the opposite of a standard invoice. If you need to refund a customer, reverse a charge, or correct a billing error, a credit note is how you handle it. It reduces what the customer owes you, or it creates a credit balance they can apply against future invoices.

The third type is a Deposit invoice. You use this when you want to request an advance payment before work begins or before goods are delivered. It’s especially useful for larger jobs where you want something upfront. That deposit amount then gets applied against the final invoice once everything is complete.

And the fourth type is a Recurring invoice. If you have customers on retainer, subscriptions, or any kind of regular billing cycle, recurring invoices let the system generate those invoices automatically on a schedule you define. You set it up once, and the system handles creating each invoice at the right time.

Now let’s walk through the lifecycle of an invoice. The workflow moves through six stages, and understanding each one tells you what you can and can’t do at that point.

It starts with an Order. When a customer order already exists in the system, you can generate an invoice directly from it, which saves you from re-entering all the line items manually.

From there, the invoice is created as a Draft. In draft state, you can still edit everything — line items, quantities, prices, tax codes, due dates. Nothing is locked in yet, so this is your chance to get things right before moving forward.

Once you’re happy with it, you Validate the invoice. Validation locks it and assigns an official invoice number. After this point you can’t edit the core details, so it’s worth taking a moment to review carefully before you validate.

The next stage is Sent. This is when the invoice goes out to the customer, whether by email directly from the system or through whatever method you use to communicate with them. The system logs that it’s been sent, which helps with tracking and follow-up.

After the customer pays, you Record the Payment. You can record full payments or partial payments, and the system will track how much remains outstanding. If a customer pays in instalments, each payment gets recorded separately and the balance updates accordingly.

Finally, once the full amount has been received and reconciled, the invoice moves to Closed. A closed invoice is complete and sits in your records for reporting and audit purposes.

Credit notes follow a similar structure — you create them, validate them, and then apply them. You can apply a credit note directly against an outstanding invoice to reduce what the customer owes, or you can leave it as an open credit on the account for future use.

It’s also worth knowing how this area connects to the rest of the system. Customer invoices link closely to Customer Orders, so if you’re raising invoices from orders, that’s where the chain starts. The Invoices and Payments module gives you the broader view of what’s been paid, what’s outstanding, and what’s overdue. And Bank Accounts is where payment reconciliation happens — when you match a bank transaction to a recorded payment, that’s the final step that moves everything to closed.

A few practical things to keep in mind. Always validate an invoice before sending it, because you can’t send a draft. If you need to correct a validated invoice, the cleanest approach is to cancel it and create a new one, or raise a credit note for the difference. And when you’re setting up recurring invoices, check the frequency, the start date, and whether the system should auto-validate them or leave them as drafts for you to review each cycle.

That covers the essentials — the four invoice types, the six-stage workflow from order through to closed, and how everything connects to the rest of the system.

That’s it for this episode of the NZRT Wiki Podcast. Thanks for listening.