Hello. We’re fairly new to QF (2-3 months) and want to email out invoices for payment at the end of the month as usual. Our clients are well-trained into paying us via BACS etc and we have need or desire to change that. Looking at the QF system is seems we have no option just to send out email invoices for payment by the usual processes, but instead clients have to log in to the system etc. Have I completely got the wrong end of the stick? I’ve got this impression because I can’t add an email contact to a client without getting ‘set up their account area’ messages, and this isn’t what we want to do.
There are 2 ways you can send an invoice to a client:
As a link, which will, by default, log them straight in to view the invoice, estimates and statements. Or,
As a PDF attachment
I would say that most people set up the contact and the client area, but don’t actually issue a password to the client directly. If you’re enforcing logging in (which is off by default), then they would need the password, but this is the only time it’s requested.
When an email with a link is sent out, the link is unique to the contact and the invoice itself (hence, the client is automatically logged in). We also log this viewing in your event log on the account so you know when they’ve viewed the invoice.
Hope that helps, but please don’t hesitate to let me know if you have any further questions.
Thanks Matthew. So once I’ve added the email address to the account, if I haven’t issued a password to the customer when I hit the button to issue an invoice will they just be sent effectively a one-off link to their invoice? Presumably they can download their invoice from there?
If they don’t have to log in to see the invoice, how can they be automatically logged in when they view the link in the email? Sorry, but somewhere a penny just won’t drop. Thank you.
Spot on. They will see a few options - Print (which generates a PDF copy), Query Invoice, and if you have it set up, Pay Online too.
The link in the email is unique to both them and the invoice. The link itself contains data which contains the relevant details. They would read the email as normal, and click the “View your invoice” button which would log them straight in and show them the invoice.
When you add a contact, you will see an option to “Impersonate Client”. If you click this, you will see what they will see.
Yes, that’s another option too. The disadvantage with sending them as a PDF, is you can’t tell when a client logs in to view the invoice (a good argument against “we didn’t receive it”).
Hi Eddie. Thanks very much for your suggestion. Knowing a client has viewed the invoice has some value for us at the moment, but we’ll see what feels like the best approach as we use QF for our invoicing for the first time at the end of this month.
