Invoices

An invoice bills a customer (a contact, a company, or a company to the attention of one of its contacts) for your work: lines with a description, a quantity and a price, an optional sales tax, terms and a due date. Fifi numbers it when you issue it, emails it with a private link the customer can open without signing in, prints it or saves it as a PDF, and keeps it 7 years. You record the payments you receive against it (cash, checks, transfers, cards taken on your own terminal), see what each customer owes and how late it is, and send reminders.

Lines can come straight from your records: a visit, a boarding stay, a service record, a deal or a delivered load becomes a line with its words, quantity and (where Fifi knows it) its price, and the record then shows Invoiced with the invoice's number.

Fifi helps you write and send invoices. It isn't tax or accounting advice: check the tax rate, what's taxable and how long you keep records with your accountant or your state's tax office.

Invoices are a module: Settings → Modules → Invoicing. It's on the Pro and Business plans. New Agency or consulting, Appointment services, Pet services, Home and field services and Freight and logistics workspaces start with it on; for every other business type it starts off and an owner or admin turns it on. (A workspace made before v0.61.0 keeps the modules it has.) Turning it off hides the pages, the menu, the cards on records and ⌘K's results, stops the customer links from working, and keeps every invoice; the workspace export always includes them. Every sample workspace has it on.

Fifi records payments; by default it doesn't take them. Money moves outside Fifi (your bank, a check, your card terminal), and you record that it arrived (or, from v0.59.0, connect your own Stripe account and customers can pay online: Fifi then records those payments for you) (see Payments). An issued invoice is Sent until something is paid, then Partially paid, then Paid; Overdue is shown for a Sent or Partially paid invoice once its due date has passed.

Who can do it:

1. Set up (Settings → Invoicing)

Owners and admins set what every new invoice starts with:

• Prefix and Next number: invoices are numbered when they're issued, in order, never reused: the prefix and the number padded to 4 digits ("INV-1001", "INV-12345"). The prefix may be up to 12 letters, digits or # / . - and changes future numbers only. The next number can only move forward ("Numbers can only move forward"); the page shows "Next invoice: INV-1042".
• Default terms: Due on receipt, Net 7, 15, 30, 45 or 60.
• Tax name and Tax rate (%): one rate per invoice, from 0 to 30 with up to 3 decimals (7.25, 8.875).
• Business address: your workspace's address, shown on every invoice (it's the same address campaign footers use).
• Your details (optional): anything else your invoices should show, like a tax ID or a license number.
• How to pay (optional): how customers pay you (bank transfer, check, card at your office). Fifi takes no payments itself unless you connect Stripe (see Online payments).
• Remind customers about overdue invoices: Off (the default), or 3, 7 or 14 days after the due date. Turning it on also reminds invoices that are already overdue (see Reminders).
• Default notes (optional): a thank-you or your policies, on every new invoice.

An issued invoice keeps the business name, address, details and payment instructions it was issued with.

2. Create an invoice

Start from:

• Invoices → New invoice, and pick the customer.
• A contact's or company's page (and a deal's): the Invoices card's New invoice.
• A record: Invoice on a visit (the calendar's visit details), a stay (the kennel board's stay details), a service record, or a delivered load. The customer, the line and (for a load) the shipper's reference as the PO are filled in.

Then:

• Customer: a Contact, a Company, or both (a company to the attention of one of its contacts).
• Bill to: the name on the invoice (the company's name, else the contact's), and its Billing address. Edit them freely: the invoice keeps its own copy.
• Email it to: one of the customer's contacts' email addresses (Fifi only emails a contact's address, so add one to their record first if there's none).
• PO or reference (optional), Invoice date (empty: the day it's issued), Terms (Custom asks for a Due date), Tax name and Tax rate.
• Lines (up to 100): a Description, a Quantity (up to 3 decimals: 1.5 hours), a Unit price (negative for a discount: "-25") and Taxable. Add line adds one; each line has Move up, Move down and Remove, all from the keyboard. The subtotal, the tax ("Sales tax 7.25% on $480.00") and the total update as you type.
• Add from records lists the customer's visits, stays, service records, deals and loads from the last 180 days that aren't on an invoice yet (newest first; a deal already on one says so: deals may be billed in parts). Tick them and click Add. A visit's price is the last price you charged for that service; a stay with a price is one line with its nights and its nightly price (see Invoicing a boarding stay), and a stay without one has its nights as the quantity and the last nightly price you charged, with its price note beside it; a load's price is its customer rate.
• Notes (optional): shown on the invoice.

Save draft keeps it as a draft: you can edit it, preview it and come back to it. Drafts have no number.

Invoicing a boarding stay

Invoice on a stay (or Add from records) makes one line for the whole stay when the stay has a price (see Set your rates):

• Quantity is the stay's nights.
• Unit price is the whole nightly price for the pets on the stay: the one-pet price plus the additional-pet price for every pet after the first.
• The line's total is nights times that, which is the stay's price to the cent. It always adds up, because the quantity is whole nights and nothing is rounded.
• The description names the rate, the pets, the dates, the nights and the nightly prices, so the customer can see where the unit price comes from. A stay with an owner's or admin's custom rate says "custom rate" instead of a rate's name.
• Taxable follows your invoice settings, as for every record: taxable while the invoice's tax rate is above 0%. Untick it on the line if it isn't. The tax is worked out once, on the invoice.

Staff can still change anything on the draft before they send it; a line is only a starting point.

Two stays in one suite (Bo and Mia from Dec 22 to Dec 25, then Bo alone from Dec 25 to Dec 27) are two lines on one invoice: $405.00 and $170.00, $575.00 in all.

A stay with no price (a kennel with no rate, or a stay booked before you set up rates) is billed as before: the line says "Boarding: …" with the nights as its quantity, and the unit price starts at the last nightly price you charged for such a stay, with the stay's Price note beside it. Prices from priced stays are never used for that: only unpriced stays teach it.

A stay is on one live invoice at a time. If it is already on one, Fifi says which. Void that invoice and the stay is free to invoice again, at its price as it is then.

If the stay changes after you invoiced it, Fifi tells you; it never changes an invoice by itself.

• On a draft, the stay's line shows "The stay is now 4 nights, $540.00" with Use the stay's price, which puts the stay's current words, quantity and unit price on that line (save the draft to keep it). If you changed the line on purpose, leave it: the note stays until you use the stay's price.
• On an issued invoice, the invoice page shows "The stay changed after this invoice was issued (now $540.00; the invoice has $405.00)", and so does the stay's details beside its Invoiced chip. The invoice, its PDF, the customer's link and the email are not touched, and the customer never sees the note. To bill the new price, void the invoice and make a new one (the stay is free to bill again once the invoice is void), or add a typed line for the difference to a new invoice.
• The note appears only when the stay's price (its nights, pets or nightly price) was changed after the invoice was issued and the stay still differs from the invoice's line. Checking the pet in or out, editing the notes or the kennel, or a change you made while the invoice was still a draft does not raise it. Fifi reads when the price changed from the stay's activity log; if the log has no entry for it (rare, old data), Fifi falls back to the last time the stay was touched, and then a check-in or a note edit can raise the note once when the line already differed. Treat the note as a prompt to look, not a verdict.

Collecting a pet early or late. When you check a pet out on a day other than the planned check-out day, the stay's details ask which nights to bill: "Planned check-out Tue Oct 6. Leaving today, Sun Oct 4? Bill 1 night or Keep 3 nights." For a pet still here after its day: "Still here after Oct 6. Bill 5 nights (until today) or Keep 3 nights." Billing until today moves the stay's check-out to this moment and re-prices the stay at its own nightly price, then checks it out. Keeping the plan changes nothing. A stay with no price (see above) is never given one by this: Bill only moves its check-out, and the "Boarding: …" line you invoice has the nights from the new check-out and the price you type. Fees for a late pickup, deposits and discounts aren't part of a stay's price: add them as typed lines (a discount is a line with a negative price).

How the money works

Money is in dollars and cents (US dollars only). A line's total is its quantity times its unit price, rounded to the cent (half a cent rounds away from zero). The tax is worked out once on the sum of the taxable lines, at the invoice's rate, and rounded once. The total is the subtotal plus the tax, at most $20,000,000.

3. Send it, or mark it as sent

• Send… issues the invoice and emails it to the address in Email it to: it gets its number, its date and due date are set from the terms, and its amounts and lines are locked. The email comes from Fifi CRM in your workspace's name, with the whole invoice and a link to view it online; replies go to you (the person who sent it). The invoice page then says "Emailed Oct 15 to megan@…".
• Mark as sent… (under More) issues it without emailing it: hand it over, or send it yourself.
• Resend… on an issued invoice emails it again.

To limit mistakes and spam, an invoice can be emailed 5 times a day, and an address gets at most 10 invoice emails a day from your workspace (and 300 a day in all). Over a limit, Send says so and nothing is issued: try again tomorrow, or Mark as sent. If the email itself doesn't go through, the invoice is still issued and the page says so ("Issued, but the email didn't go. Try Resend."). Sample workspaces never send email (use Mark as sent).

4. The invoice page, print and PDF

The page shows the invoice as the customer sees it, its status (Draft, Sent, Overdue · 12 days, Void), when it was emailed, when its link was first opened ("Link opened Oct 16": some email services open links to check them, so this may not mean the customer read it), and the records its lines bill.

Print (or Preview for a draft) opens the invoice alone, for paper or Print or save as PDF (Letter or A4). A draft prints marked DRAFT; a void invoice says VOID.

5. The customer link

Every issued invoice has a private link (/v/…), in its email and under Copy customer link. Anyone with the link sees the invoice (never the email address it was sent to), without signing in; search engines are told not to list it. The link stops working when the invoice is in the trash, when Invoicing is off, or when an owner or admin clicks More → Reset link… (every link sent before stops working; copy the new one to share it again). A link that doesn't work just says "That link isn't valid". When you've connected Stripe, an open invoice's link also has a Pay button; see Online payments.

6. After it's issued

An issued invoice's amounts, lines, customer and number are locked, so what the customer has stays true. To change it:

• Correct details… (owners and admins): the terms and due date, the notes, the PO, the email it goes to and the billing address. The page says "Corrected on Oct 16 by Adam Admin", and the activity log records it.
• Void… (owners and admins): with a reason ("Wrong rate; see INV-1012"). A void invoice keeps its number and stays on the list, marked Void; the records it billed can be invoiced again. An invoice can be voided only while nothing is paid: refund or void its payments first ("Refund or void its payments first"). It can't be voided while a customer's bank payment is processing either ("Wait until the bank payment clears or fails"; see Online payments).
• Duplicate makes a new draft with the same customer and lines (the records too, once the original is void), to fix and send again.

7. The list

Invoices lists drafts first, then issued invoices newest first, 50 a page (cards on a phone). Tabs: All, Drafts, Open, Overdue, Paid, Void. Filter by customer and issue dates, or search a number ("1042", "INV-1042"). The Balance column is what's still owed. Above the list: what's Open and what's Overdue, in dollars (balances, not totals). Invoices, Payments and Receivables are tabs at the top of the page. Export CSV downloads what the list shows (amounts as plain numbers like 1250.00).

⌘K finds an invoice by its number. A contact's or company's page shows its latest invoices and the balance due in its Invoices card, and its timeline says "Invoice INV-1042 sent to Megan Ross: $1,250.00, due Nov 14" (and when one is voided).

8. Deleting and keeping invoices

• A draft can be deleted by whoever created it, or an owner or admin. It goes to Settings → Trash, where an owner or admin can restore it for 30 days; then it's deleted for good.
• An issued or void invoice is kept 7 years after it was issued, whatever happens: until then Delete shows "Kept until Oct 16, 2033 (7 years after issue)", for everyone. After that, owners and admins can delete it.
• Deleting a contact or company doesn't remove its invoices: they keep the name and address they were billed to.
• The workspace export (Settings → Workspace → Export everything) includes every invoice (drafts and void ones too), its lines and your invoice settings.

9. For developers

The API reads invoices and payments with the Invoices and payments (invoices:read) scope: GET /api/v1/invoices (filters: status, contact_id, company_id, issued_after, issued_before, overdue), GET /api/v1/invoices/{id} (with its lines and payments) and GET /api/v1/payments (filters: invoice_id, received_after, received_before, method, kind, include_voided). It's read only. Webhooks send invoice.sent, invoice.voided, invoice.paid, payment.recorded and payment.voided (without lines, notes or the billing address). See API keys and the REST API, Webhooks and the /developers page.

10. Record payments

Open an issued invoice and click Record payment (any member can). Fill in:

• Amount: it starts at the balance due. A partial payment is fine ("Enter an amount like 125.50"); it can never be more than the balance due.
• Date received: today by default; never in the future.
• How it was paid: Cash, Check, Bank transfer (ACH or wire), Card (taken outside Fifi), or Other.
• Reference (optional): a check number or transaction ID. Never a card number: Fifi refuses anything that looks like one ("Don't enter card numbers. Use the last 4 or the receipt number."), in the reference and the notes.
• Notes (optional).

The invoice's Paid, Balance due and status update at once, and the page announces it ("Payment recorded. Balance due $240.00." or "Paid in full."). The balance and the status are worked out from the payments by the database, so they can't drift: two people recording at the same moment can't pay more than is owed.

The Payments section of the invoice lists every payment (date, method, reference, who recorded it, amount). Payments are on the customer's timeline ("Payment received: $500.00 by check for INV-1042", "Invoice INV-1042 paid"), and the customer's link and the printed invoice show them (date and amount only) with the balance.

Refunds and mistakes (owners and admins):

• Refund records money you gave back (up to what's been paid, with a date and method). It reduces what's paid ("−$50.00 · Refund") and reopens the balance.
• Void on a payment is for an entry made in error (entered twice, the wrong invoice). The payment stays on the invoice, struck through with a Voided badge and your reason, and the balance is reopened. Payments are never deleted.
• Once everything paid is refunded or voided, the invoice can be voided.

Payments recorded by hand only go on an issued invoice that isn't void. Online payments (Online (Stripe)) are recorded by Fifi from Stripe; you can't enter them or void them, and refunds of them are made in Stripe (see Online payments). Payments recorded in QuickBooks and brought in by the QuickBooks sync are labelled Recorded in QuickBooks; you can't void them here (This payment came from QuickBooks. Change it there.): change or delete them in QuickBooks and Fifi follows. The QuickBooks export files leave them out (they are already in QuickBooks). To take a deposit, issue the invoice, then record the deposit.

11. Payments and Receivables

Invoices → Payments lists every payment and refund, newest first, 50 a page. Filter by date received, method, kind and customer, and include voided entries (struck through, never counted). Above the list: what was Received, Refunded and the Net for the filter. Export CSV downloads what's filtered (a refund's amount is positive; the Kind column says Refund). The dashboard's Money card shows what's Open, what's Overdue and what was Received in the last 30 days (payments less refunds), each linking to the list that adds up to it.

Invoices → Receivables shows what each customer owes on open invoices, by how late: Current (not yet due), 1–30, 31–60, 61–90 and 90+ days past the due date, as of today in your own time zone. The amounts are balances (total less what's paid), biggest customer first, with a totals row. Click an amount to see the invoices it adds up. Export CSV downloads it. On a phone each customer is a card.

12. Reminders

• Send reminder (on an open invoice with an email address; any member): emails the invoice again with the subject "Reminder: Invoice INV-1042 from Acme was due Nov 14, 2026 (12 days ago)" and its balance due. It's the invoice email's rules: only to a contact's address, replies come to you, the same daily limits, and at most one reminder a day for an invoice (the button says "Sent today"). It's on the customer's timeline.
• Automatic reminders are off unless an owner or admin picks 3, 7 or 14 days after the due date in Settings → Invoicing. Fifi then emails the reminder that many days after the due date and every that many days after, at most 3 for one invoice, only while it's open (not paid, void or deleted), has an email address, and Invoicing is on. A daily job (morning in the US) sends them. Neither kind of reminder goes out while the customer's bank payment is processing (it resumes if that payment fails). Turning it on also reminds invoices that are already overdue (each gets its first reminder at the next daily run, then every that many days, up to 3 in all). Reminders share your workspace's daily email budget (300 emails a day) with the invoices you send; the automatic ones use at most half of what is left when the job runs, so your team can still send that day, and the rest wait for the next run. Turning the setting off stops them. Sample workspaces never send.

13. Export to QuickBooks

To send invoices and payments to QuickBooks Online automatically instead, connect it (see Connect QuickBooks Online; coming soon). Payments recorded in QuickBooks come back to the invoice. Without that, Fifi writes a file that QuickBooks imports, so your books can have what you've billed and what you've been paid. Owners and admins do it; nothing leaves Fifi until you import the file yourself, and sample workspaces can do it too.

QuickBooks Online has no way to import received payments from a file, so a payments file is for QuickBooks Desktop only.

Export invoices or payments

1. Invoices → Export for QuickBooks (for payments, Invoices → Payments → Export payments for QuickBooks Desktop).
2. Pick QuickBooks Online (CSV) or QuickBooks Desktop (IIF); for IIF pick Invoices or Payments.
3. Pick the dates: issue dates for invoices, dates received for payments. It starts with the previous calendar month. A range is at most 2 years.
4. Leave Only what hasn't been exported ticked. Every invoice or payment in a file is marked as exported, and this keeps it from going into QuickBooks twice. Untick it to download them again (they're marked again). The invoice page says "Exported for QuickBooks · Oct 31" in small grey text, and the Invoices list has a Not exported for QuickBooks filter.
5. For the CSV, choose what to do with invoices that have sales tax: Skip them, or Add sales tax as a line (see below).
6. Read the preview: N invoices ready, how many were already exported, how many wait for the next file, and a list of what can't be exported, and why. Then Download.

A file is at most 100 invoices (QuickBooks Online CSV), 500 invoices or 2,000 payments (IIF). If more are waiting, the dialog says "Only the first 100 go in one file. 140 more: import this file, then download the next." and, after you download, the button reads Download the next 100. The oldest invoices go first. With Only what hasn't been exported unticked the dialog remembers where the last file ended, so Download the next carries on after it instead of starting again; change the dates or any choice and it starts from the beginning. Invoices that can't be written (their lines don't add up to their total) are listed and don't count as waiting.

If a file never arrived

A file is marked exported when it is built, before your browser has it. If the connection drops or the browser closes before the file is saved, the invoices in it are marked exported and a normal download (box ticked) will say there is nothing new. To get the file again, either:

• use the same dates, untick Only what hasn't been exported and download (the invoices are marked again); or
• use Download that batch again, which the dialog shows under the counts for 24 hours after an export ("Exported at 2:03 PM: 100 invoices"). It writes exactly the invoices of that export and doesn't change any marks.

The dialog says so when a download fails part-way: "The invoices in this file may be marked exported. Untick “Only what hasn’t been exported” and use the same dates to download it again."

Void invoices, refunds, voided payments, and what a format can't carry are listed, not exported:

• A void invoice is never exported. If you exported it before voiding it, the preview says so ("exported on 10/31/2026, so void it in QuickBooks").
• A refund or a voided payment isn't exported: record refunds in QuickBooks by hand.
• QuickBooks Online CSV: an invoice with a discount line (a negative price) can't be imported; enter it by hand. An invoice with sales tax is skipped unless you choose Add sales tax as a line.
• IIF: discounts and sales tax are carried. An invoice with sales tax needs your sales tax item (below), or it is listed instead.

Names in QuickBooks (Settings → Invoicing → QuickBooks)

QuickBooks only accepts names it already has, spelled exactly the same. Set them once in Settings → Invoicing → QuickBooks, or in the dialog's Names in QuickBooks (the same form). They're one line of up to 100 characters; a colon, like Services:Pest control, means a sub-item or sub-account in QuickBooks.

• Product or service: written on every line (default "Services"); you can give visits, stays, service records, deals, loads, typed lines and discounts a name of their own.
• Sales tax item: for invoices with sales tax. Empty: those invoices are listed, not exported.
• Account names (QuickBooks Desktop): receivables ("Accounts Receivable"), income ("Services"), sales tax ("Sales Tax Payable") and the account payments are deposited to ("Undeposited Funds").

Customer names come from the invoice's Bill to (so an invoice still exports after its customer is deleted). Tabs and line breaks become spaces, and a colon becomes " - " (QuickBooks reads a colon in a customer name as a job). QuickBooks Desktop cuts customer names at 41 characters; the preview says which.

Import it into QuickBooks Online

The invoice CSV uses the names Intuit's importer maps by itself. Before you import:

1. Turn on Custom transaction numbers (Settings → Account and settings → Sales tab → Sales form content), so invoice numbers stay Fifi's.
2. In Settings → Import data → Invoices, upload the file and pick the date format MM/DD/YYYY.
3. Tick the option to add customers that don't exist yet.
4. Product and service names must exist in QuickBooks; for a name it can't find, the importer uses its generic Sales item.

QuickBooks Online refuses the import if your company uses its sales tax feature. That's a limit of QuickBooks, not Fifi. "Add sales tax as a line" is for companies that track tax outside QuickBooks' sales tax: the tax goes in as a line (your sales tax item, quantity 1, the tax amount, "Sales tax 8.875%"). Otherwise skip taxed invoices and enter them by hand, or wait for the sync.

Import it into QuickBooks Desktop

Back up your company file first: Intuit warns that IIF files are easy to get wrong.

1. File → Utilities → Import → IIF Files, and pick the file (fifi-invoices-quickbooks-desktop-2026-10-31.iif).
2. Customers that don't exist are added by name; existing ones are left as they are (addresses aren't overwritten).
3. The accounts and items named in Fifi (Names in QuickBooks) must exist, spelled the same.
4. Payments: IIF can't say which invoice a payment is for. QuickBooks applies it automatically if Automatically apply payments is on (Edit → Preferences → Sales & Customers); otherwise it appears as a credit to apply in Receive Payments. The payment's reference is the file's reference number (at most 11 characters) and its memo is the invoice number.

Amounts are exact dollars and cents; a line Fifi rounded (1.5 × $33.33) is written as quantity 1 with the original in its words ("Boarding (1.5 × $33.33)"), so QuickBooks never works out a different total.

Every download is recorded in the activity log ("exported invoices for QuickBooks Online (100 invoices)", with the dates and counts, never a name). You can export up to 20 times an hour, one at a time. If someone else exports at the same moment, then with Only what hasn't been exported ticked the two files never hold the same invoice (the second export is told "Someone else was exporting or changing these invoices... Try again" if the first took everything it had chosen). With the box unticked you are asking for invoices again, so two such files can hold the same ones.