Finance & Invoicing

What Finance Does

• Generate invoices from logged billable hours and billable expenses (one click from the project Finance tab)
• Support manual line items for retainers, flat fees, and expenses
• Manage invoice lifecycle: Draft → Sent → Viewed → Paid
• Generate branded PDF invoices (downloadable, shareable with clients)
• Track per-project expenses: hard costs that feed directly into profitability calculations
• Show per-project profitability: budget consumed, revenue, cost (time + expenses), gross profit, margin %
• Partial payment recording — track installments against a single invoice
• Invoice branding: logo, brand colour, footer note, bank/payment details on every PDF
• Stripe payment links — generate a hosted checkout link per invoice; clients pay with one click
• Automated payment reminders at 5 scheduled intervals (3 days before through 21 days overdue)

Invoice Numbering

Every invoice gets a sequential number in the format INV-YYYY-NNN — for example, INV-2026-001. The sequence is per organization and resets each calendar year.

Numbering is atomic — two invoices created simultaneously will never get the same number. The counter lives on your organization record and is incremented with a database lock on creation.

Invoice Lifecycle

Invoices follow a defined state machine. Each status has specific allowed actions:

State machine flow

Creating an Invoice

Method 1: From a project (most common)

Method 2: From the invoices list (manual invoice)

Go to Finance → Invoices → New Invoice. Select a project and contact, and manually add line items. This is useful for flat-fee retainers, expense reimbursements, or milestone-based billing that doesn't directly map to logged hours.

Invoice Line Items

Each line item on an invoice has:

When generating from time entries, ACOS groups entries into line items by service type (if tasks are linked to services) or by team member. You can reorganize these groupings before saving.

PDF Invoices

Every invoice can be exported as a branded PDF. PDF generation happens in the background (via Celery + WeasyPrint). When you click Download PDF, ACOS checks whether the PDF is ready:

• If ready: download starts immediately.
• If not yet ready: ACOS returns a 202 Accepted response. Wait 5 seconds and try again (a Retry-After header tells the client how long to wait).
• PDFs include your organization logo, bill-from details, bill-to contact, invoice number, dates, line items table, and total.

PDF contents

• Your organization's name, logo, and address
• Client's name and address (from the contact record)
• Invoice number, issue date, and due date
• Line items table with description, quantity, unit price, and line total
• Subtotal, tax line (if applicable), and grand total
• Payment terms and any notes you added to the invoice

Marking Invoices Paid

When a client pays:

What happens to linked time entries

Once an invoice is marked Paid, all the time entries that were included in that invoice have is_invoiced = true set. They will not appear in future invoice generation for the same project. This prevents double-billing.

Partial Payments

Available on Growth and Scale plans. Allows recording payment in installments against a single invoice.

Project Finance Tab

Every project has a Finance tab that gives you the full financial picture of that engagement — KPI cards at the top, invoices below, and the full expense list at the bottom.

Expense Tracking

Expenses capture hard costs on a project — software subscriptions, contractor fees, travel, hardware, marketing spend — separate from time-based cost. Every expense either is or isn't billable to the client, and all expenses roll up into the project's profitability numbers automatically.

Adding an expense

Expense categories

Billable vs non-billable expenses

A billable expense will appear as a selectable line item when you generate an invoice from the project. Toggle the Billable switch when adding or editing the expense. Non-billable expenses still count toward your project cost and reduce your margin — they just don't appear on the client-facing invoice.

Editing and deleting expenses

Click the edit icon on any expense row to open the form pre-filled with existing values. Click the trash icon to delete — a confirmation dialog prevents accidental deletion. Both actions immediately recalculate the project's total cost and gross profit.

Global expenses view

Go to Finance → Expensesto see every expense across all projects in one table. Filter by category, billable status, or search by title. Click any row to jump directly to that project's Finance tab. This view is useful for end-of-month cost reviews or when you need to find a specific contractor invoice across multiple engagements.

Overdue Invoice Detection

ACOS runs a daily background task that checks for invoices with status = sent and due_date < today - 7 days. It creates a Smart Alert (Overdue Invoice warning) for each one found. If the invoice is still unpaid 21 days past due, the alert severity escalates to Critical.

These alerts appear on your Dashboard and in the Smart Alerts section. See Smart Alerts for details.

Roles & Permissions

Best Practices

• Always save as Draft first and preview the PDF before sending. Errors on a sent invoice (wrong amount, wrong client) require a cancellation and reissue.
• Set net payment terms consistently — if your standard is 30 days, always set the due date to issue date + 30. This makes the overdue alert system reliable.
• Invoice regularly, not just at project end. Monthly invoicing keeps cash flow healthy and gives clients predictable billing.
• Add meaningful descriptions to time entries — they become line item descriptions on the invoice. 'Frontend development sprint 3' is more professional than 'dev work'.
• Match your invoice to the proposal scope. If the invoice total is significantly higher than the original deal value, expect the client to question it.

FAQ

Invoice Branding

Every invoice PDF can carry your brand. Configure branding at Settings → Invoice (Growth+ plans). Changes apply to all future PDFs and regenerated PDFs immediately.

• Logo — upload PNG, JPG, or SVG (max 2 MB). The logo replaces the org name text in the PDF header. If no logo is uploaded, the org name is shown in your brand colour instead.
• Brand colour — hex colour applied to the invoice table header row, the Total row background, and the accent line below the header. Defaults to ACOS gold (#C9A84C).
• Footer note — a short message printed at the bottom of every invoice PDF. Use it for a thank-you line, your registered business address, or tax information.
• Bank / payment details — multi-line field for bank name, account number, IBAN, routing number, etc. Each line renders on its own line in the PDF under a Payment Instructions heading.
• Default payment terms — pre-fills Due on Receipt, Net 7, Net 14, or Net 30 on every new invoice. Individual invoices can override this.

Stripe Payment Links

Connect your Stripe account under Settings → Integrations → Stripe. Once connected, an invoice detail page shows a Generate Payment Link button. Clicking it creates a hosted Stripe Checkout page and stores the link on the invoice.

• The payment link appears as a Pay Now → button in the client portal.
• Links are per-invoice — each invoice gets its own Stripe Payment Link.
• Stripe sends you a webhook when the payment completes. ACOS marks the invoice Paid automatically.
• Disconnect Stripe any time from Settings → Integrations. Existing links remain valid.

Automated Payment Reminders

ACOS sends automatic reminder emails to the invoice contact at five scheduled points. Reminders use your org email (Gmail API) and include a link to the client portal where the client can view and pay the invoice.

• Reminders only fire on invoices with status Sent or Overdue — Draft and Paid invoices are skipped.
• Each reminder type is sent at most once per invoice — no duplicate sends.
• Org-level toggle: Settings → Invoice → Automatic reminders. When off, no reminders fire for any invoice in the org.
• Per-invoice toggle: the Reminders section on each invoice detail page. Disable reminders for a specific invoice without affecting others.
• Manual send: click Send reminder now from the invoice detail page to fire a reminder immediately regardless of schedule.
• Reminder history: every sent reminder is logged with type, recipient email, and timestamp. Visible on the invoice detail page.