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. If the contact's registry code has changed since the invoice was issued, the contact now names a different company, so the email goes to the address the client had when the invoice was issued instead. If there's no address on record for that customer, Arvello says so, and the way to correct the invoice is Fix and re-issue, or a credit note and a new invoice.
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. The email that carries it is written in the same language when that is English or Estonian, and in English otherwise.
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. A credit note comes off in the month the invoice was paid if it came first, or in its own month if it came afterwards — so a later credit never changes a month you have already seen.
The Sales dashboard's Revenue This Month and vs Last Month cards are net of VAT, because VAT you charge a customer is collected for the state rather than earned: it is a debt to the Tax Board, not income. That is why revenue reads lower than the invoice totals it came from — the same figure your profit & loss calls revenue. Outstanding and Overdue stay VAT-inclusive on the same screen — what a customer owes you does include the VAT. An invoice counts in the month it was paid, and a credit note takes off its own net amount: in the month the invoice was paid if the credit came first, or in the credit note's own month if it came afterwards — so a month you have already seen never changes because of a later credit. When credit notes take either month below zero, the card shows no percentage change: no percentage describes a move from a negative month, or across zero.
The two reports still count a given invoice in different months, and deliberately so. These cards count an invoice when it was paid, which is the question a sales dashboard answers; the profit & loss counts it when it was issued, which is what accrual accounting requires. An invoice issued in June and paid in July is June revenue on the profit & loss and July revenue here. Use the profit & loss when the month has to be the accounting month.
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.
If you entered opening balances, the payment's date must fall after their date. They already include everything that happened on or before that day, so a payment received by then is already counted there, and Arvello refuses the date rather than count the money twice.
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.
Rarely, a payment is saved but Arvello can't confirm its journal entry. It then closes the form with a warning instead of asking you to try again: check the Payments tab, and if the payment is listed there, reverse it and record it again. If the reversal fails, contact support.
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 stored PDF (available on sent, paid and credited invoices). It reproduces the invoice as it was issued: the same amounts, and your company's and the client's details as they stood when you finalised it. Later edits to the client or to your company settings don't reach it. Resending after a regenerate attaches the rebuilt file.
- Fix and re-issue cancels the invoice and opens a copy as a new draft, so you can correct the client's details or the lines and finalise it again under the next number. It has the same limits as Cancel below, and it isn't offered once the invoice has gone out as an e-invoice. If you emailed the invoice, the confirmation reminds you to tell the client it has been replaced. See Drafts versus sent invoices.
- Cancel Invoice reverses the journal entries and marks the invoice cancelled. It is only available while no payment has been recorded against the invoice and no credit note has been issued for it. Cancelling also removes the invoice from its period's VAT return, so it is refused once that period's KMD has been filed or once the fiscal year has been locked by an approved annual report (unlock the report first). It isn't available either once the invoice has been sent as an e-invoice, or while a send may still be delivered: the client's books have it, so the correction is a credit note, which goes out over Peppol too. In those cases — and for any partial correction — issue a credit note instead.
- Refunds. When a customer has paid more than the invoice now asks for — after a credit note, or through an overpayment — the invoice shows the amount owed back. Refunds are covered in Credit notes & refunds.