Sending invoices & getting paid
Send invoices by email as PDF, track sent, paid and overdue statuses, and record payments automatically through Estonian bank reconciliation in Arvello.
Once an invoice is finalised, getting it to the client and tracking the money back in is mostly a matter of watching statuses change. This page covers the email route; for the structured alternative, see E-invoices & Peppol.
Sending an invoice by email
Send Invoice on a draft finalises it first — assigning the number and posting the entries — and then emails the client, so one confirmation does both jobs. The email goes to the address on the client's contact record, and Arvello warns you if the contact has no email address.
What the client receives is a short email with the invoice ready to file:
- a subject line of the form "Invoice INV-000123 from Your Company OÜ" (an OÜ is an Estonian private limited company);
- a summary of the invoice number, issue date, due date and total;
- the invoice PDF attached to the email itself — what accountants file and archives keep;
- a Download Invoice button, plus a plain link, as a backup copy of the same PDF (and the fallback if the file is ever too large to attach);
- a footer noting that the invoice was sent by your company via Arvello.
The PDF itself uses your design (see Invoice designer), and its labels are printed in the contact's invoice language, falling back to English.
Statuses and overdue tracking
A sent invoice stays Sent until something happens: payment in full makes it Paid, a part-payment shows it as Partial, and sailing past the due date flags it Overdue — automatically, in red, with no action needed from you. The invoice list shows running totals for Outstanding, Overdue and Paid This Month, and you can filter by status. The Sales dashboard surfaces the same picture, including how many days each overdue invoice has been waiting.
Those three totals are always in euros. An invoice raised in another currency is counted at the exchange rate stored on it, so a 10 000 dollar invoice never reads as 10 000 euros — while each individual row still shows its own currency. Paid This Month counts by when an invoice was settled — when the payment that cleared its balance was recorded — rather than by the date the invoice was issued, so an invoice raised in June and paid in July belongs to July's figure.
Recording payments
Every payment against an invoice is listed on the invoice's Payments tab with its date, amount received, method and notes. Partial payments are fine: the invoice shows the outstanding balance and keeps its Partial badge until the total is covered, at which point it flips to Paid.
Recording a payment yourself
While an invoice still has an outstanding balance, Record payment on the Payments tab opens a short form — the amount (pre-filled with what is still outstanding), the date it arrived, the bank account it landed in, the method, and an optional note.
Choosing the right bank account matters: Arvello books the money to that account's own ledger, so the account's balance and the cash figure on your dashboard stay accurate rather than double-counting. If you have a single connected account it is picked for you. Leave the field on Cash / undeposited funds for a cash payment, or one you have not yet paid into the bank — that money sits in the general cash account until you do.
Recording a payment yourself is for euro invoices. For a foreign-currency invoice, settle it through bank reconciliation instead — that path uses the payment-date exchange rate and books the currency difference for you.
Letting the bank do it
Most of the time you will not need the form. Payments are recorded by matching bank transactions to invoices on the reconciliation screen, and Arvello does most of that matching for you:
| The incoming bank transaction... | What happens |
|---|---|
| Mentions the invoice number and equals the outstanding amount | Matched automatically; payment recorded |
| Equals the outstanding amount, and the payer's name or IBAN matches the client | Matched automatically |
| Equals the outstanding amount, with no other confirmation | Suggested for your review |
| Mentions the invoice number but for a different amount | Suggested as a possible part-payment |
With a bank connection, incoming payments are matched as transactions arrive — invoices mark themselves paid and the journal entries are posted for you. See Reconciliation.
Anything not matched automatically waits on the reconciliation screen, where you can match a transaction to any open invoice yourself, including allocating part of a transaction as an invoice payment.
Reversing a payment
Recorded a payment by mistake — wrong amount, wrong date, wrong invoice? On the invoice's Payments tab, choose Reverse payment on the payment's row and confirm. The amount leaves the invoice's paid total (the invoice steps back to Sent or Partial accordingly) and Arvello posts a reversing journal entry, so the books stay complete — the original entry is kept and marked as reversed, never deleted.
Two cases the button does not cover:
- Payments that came from a matched bank transaction are reversed by undoing the match on the reconciliation screen (Undo Match on the transaction) — the transaction is then free to match again.
- Payments dated in a fiscal year you have locked need the annual report unlocked first.
Resending and corrections
- A finalised invoice that has never been emailed shows Send by Email — finalising on its own posts the entries but sends nothing, and the button label tells you which is the case.
- Resend Email appears once an email has actually gone out, and sends the same email (with the current PDF attached) again — useful when the original "never arrived". Hover over the button to see when the last one was sent; every send is also listed on the invoice's Activity tab.
- Regenerate PDF rebuilds the document with your latest company and contact details (available on sent and paid invoices); the amounts are untouched. Resending after a regenerate attaches the rebuilt file.
- Cancel Invoice reverses the journal entries and marks the invoice cancelled. It is only available while no payment has been recorded against the invoice.