Invoices
Build one-off or scheduled invoices from hourly time, fixed-fee value, expenses, and custom lines, then send an immutable bill.
An invoice is where tracked work turns into money owed. It's the fifth link in the Clients → Projects → Tasks → Time → Invoices → Payment chain: Hoursmith gathers your billable, un-invoiced time from Hourly projects, available fixed-fee contract value, billable expenses, and custom lines into a single bill you review and send.
How an invoice is built
When you generate an invoice, you choose which Hourly time, fixed-fee balance, and expenses to include. Hourly time supports five grouping options; fixed-fee projects can be billed in full or in partial installments. You can then apply a discount and tax and send it from your own email domain, so clients see your address, not ours. See Create an invoice and Grouping.
One-off and recurring invoices
An ordinary invoice is created immediately. On Studio and Agency, a recurring series instead stores versioned instructions for repeat manual fees, eligible unbilled hourly time and expenses, or both. No future invoice exists until its occurrence is due, so projections do not reserve invoice numbers, consume invoice quota, or count as revenue.
Once generated, the child is an ordinary Hoursmith invoice with the same Draft, Sent, Paid, and Cancelled lifecycle. Recurring auto-send emails the invoice; it never charges the client.
Statuses
An invoice moves through a small set of statuses:
| Status | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Draft | Being prepared; still editable. |
| Sent | Issued to the client. |
| Paid | Settled in full. |
| Cancelled | Voided. |
Overdue isn't a stored status — it's derived from the due date when a sent invoice hasn't been paid in time. Separately, an invoice tracks a payment status: unpaid, partially paid, paid, or refunded. See Statuses.
Invoices are immutable snapshots
This is the rule that makes invoices trustworthy: once sent, an invoice is frozen. Its bill-to details and line prices become an immutable snapshot, so editing a client or rate later has no effect on a past invoice. The time entries and expenses it contains are locked when the Draft is created. See Immutable snapshots.
Every Sent invoice also gets a shareable public link your client can open without logging in.
Getting paid
Once an invoice is sent, your client can pay it online or offline, and the invoice flips to Paid when it's settled. See Payments.
Doing it
Create an invoice
Pull billable time into a bill.
Recurring invoices
Schedule repeat fees and eligible usage.
Grouping
Five ways to group invoice lines.
Send an invoice
Email it from your own domain.
Immutable snapshots
Why a sent invoice never changes.