Hello and welcome to the Optionpay academy. In this video we will review how to create and send invoices to customers for payment. To navigate to this area, simply find the “Invoices” drop down button in the navigation bar.
If this is the first invoice you will be sending, you will, first, need to create a “Client” to send the invoice to. After opening the “Invoices” drop down, click on the “Manage/Add Clients” button. This will take you a screen which displays all invoice clients. To add a new client, simply click on “Create a New Client Account”. This will take you to the client creation page where you can enter all client contact information. The only required field in the form is the “Organization” field, which is marked with an asterisk.
Note, that although the “Active” checkbox is not required to create the client profile, this is required to be able to select the client from selection when creating and sending the invoice. When you have entered and completed the desired fields, scroll to the bottom of the page, and click the “Save” button. To go back to the previous page without saving the client profile, click on the “Return to Manage Clients” button.
At any time, if you wish to add or change information on the client invoice profile, you can do so by finding the client in the client list, clicking the dropdown arrow beside the name of the client, and clicking the “Edit” button. This will take you back to the client details page where you can enter the information to add or edit and save changes by clicking “Save”.
To create an invoice, you can either click on the button for “Send Quick Invoice” or “Manage/Send Invoices” and then “Create a New Invoice”
From here, select the “Client to Invoice”. You’ll notice that the Invoice number is prepopulated, but you can also override that value by entering your own invoice number. The invoice date automatically selects the current date. You can also select a due date for the invoice, if desired, but this is not mandatory. The late payment fee is also optional, and the value is a percentage of the total invoice value.
Additionally, you are able to add an attachment to the invoice if you wish, which will add that file as an attachment on the invoice notification email. From here, proceed to fill in the Payment Terms if desired, the description for the invoice item, the amount of the invoice item and choose whether or not you want to add tax to the item in the “Taxable” column. If you wish to breakdown the cost of the invoice per line item, you can add additional items using the “Add Another Item” button.
You’ll notice that as you add more line items, the Subtotal and Total fields will automatically update. Below this, there are 2 fields for “Notes to Client” and “Internal Notes”. Any notes added in the “Notes to Client” field, will appear on the invoice sent to the client, and any notes added in the “Internal Notes” field will only be visible in the Optionpay portal.
Once completed, click “Save” and you will be redirected to a page that looks like this:
Notice that below the invoice summary are a number of options as well as 2 messages:
“This invoice has not been sent yet” and “This invoice has not been paid yet”.
For the options, the most important to take note of are “Activate this Invoice (allows payments)” and “Activate and Send this Invoice”.
Activating an invoice allows it to be paid, and an invoice link is generated which can be sent to the customer to pay their invoice online
When you send an invoice, a dialogue box will appear asking to confirm which email addresses to send the invoice to, and the default email address to appear will be the one that was associated with the client profile creation.
If a client pays the invoice at the link provided, the invoice status will be updated to “Paid”. If the client decides to pay the invoice offline (for example, in person) you are able to mark an invoice as paid by using the corresponding invoice option button.
Once the invoice has been sent and/or paid, the messages that appear at the bottom will disappear respectively.
Please note that when an invoice is in an “Active” status, it is not possible to edit the invoice, but an invoice can be deactivated, edited, and then re-activated once again.
This has been “How to send an Invoice” on the Optionpay academy. Thanks for watching and please get in touch if you have any other questions.