Invoices
An invoice gathers billable time and expenses into a bill you send from your own domain. It's an immutable snapshot once generated.
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 — plus any billable expenses — into a single bill you review and send.
How an invoice is built
When you generate an invoice, you choose how its lines are grouped — there are five grouping options — and you can apply a discount and tax. You then send it from your own email domain, so clients see your address, not ours. See Create an invoice and Grouping.
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 generated, an invoice is frozen. The bill-to details and line prices are captured at generation and never change afterward — editing a client or a rate later has no effect on a past invoice. The time entries and expenses it contains are locked too. 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.
Grouping
Five ways to group invoice lines.
Send an invoice
Email it from your own domain.
Immutable snapshots
Why a sent invoice never changes.