Invoicing and payments

Create and send invoices, record full or partial payments, handle multi-currency settlement and track what you’re owed.

What invoicing in Qontab is

Invoicing is how you bill customers and track what you’re owed. In Qontab an invoice is a document that becomes an accounting fact the moment you send it: a sales invoice debits Accounts Receivable and credits your revenue, so the amount due shows up in your books and on your balance sheet. As payments come in, Qontab clears the receivable against a real bank account and moves the invoice from sent to partially paid to paid — keeping your double-entry ledger correct at every step.

It’s the same engine for money owed to you and money you owe: purchase invoices and debit notes run the mirror-image entries through Accounts Payable. Every invoice gets a sequential INV-YYYY-NNNNNN number that can never be reused.

Invoice types

Qontab supports four invoice types, two on each side of the ledger:

• Sales invoice — you bill a customer. DR Accounts Receivable, CR revenue (CR VAT output when a line is taxed).
• Purchase invoice — a supplier bills you. DR expense (DR VAT input), CR Accounts Payable.
• Credit note — a sales-side correction that reduces what a customer owes (runs the same accounts as a sales invoice).
• Debit note — a purchase-side correction that adjusts what you owe a supplier (mirrors a purchase invoice).

From draft to paid

An invoice moves through a clear, auditable lifecycle. Nothing touches the general ledger until you send, so you can draft freely without polluting your books.

1. Create (draft) — choose the contact, add lines (description, quantity, unit price, tax rate and the revenue or expense account), and save. Subtotal, tax and total are computed for you.
2. Send — Qontab posts the issuance journal entry to the GL, recognising the receivable (or payable) and the revenue (or cost), and stamps the invoice with its INV-YYYY-NNNNNN number.
3. Record payment(s) — as the invoice is settled, each receipt clears part or all of the balance.
4. Paid — once the paid amount equals the total, the invoice is marked paid. Tax on the line is handled per your VAT settings.

Recording payments

A payment always settles into a real bank or cash account you choose — never the director’s loan account, because that money would never have actually reached the company. Qontab debits the bank and credits Accounts Receivable (for a sale), then updates the invoice’s paid amount and status.

• Partial payments — record what you actually received. The invoice becomes partially paid and tracks the remaining balance; record further receipts until it’s settled.
• Allocation — split one receipt across more than one destination account when a payment is shared.
• Cross-currency settlement — if you’re paid in a different currency than the invoice, Qontab books the bank line in the bank’s currency and the receivable in the invoice currency at the day’s rates, then routes the rounding difference to a realised FX gain or loss account. Cross-currency receipts target a single registered bank account.

Editing and deleting

Invoices are edited in place, the same way transactions are. Editing a sent invoice rewrites it, re-posts its journal entry keeping the original number, re-links any attachments, and resets the payment state to a clean baseline so you can re-record receipts. There’s no reversal or contra entry left behind cluttering the ledger.

Deleting an invoice is a hard delete: Qontab unwinds any recorded payments and removes the issuance entry, so the ledger keeps no trace of it. Attached files are kept — only the bookkeeping is removed. (Old cancelled or voided invoices from before this model are left untouched.)

Invoice with AI (MCP)

Connected to an AI assistant through the Qontab MCP connector, the whole flow is a sentence. The connector exposes create_invoice, update_invoice, send_invoice, record_invoice_payment, edit_invoice_payment and cancel_invoice as individual tools — and the composite record_paid_invoice, which chains create → send → pay in one call for an invoice that was already settled. Omit the payment fields and it stops after sending.

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