The Invoice Blog
Master your freelance billing, scale your small business, and never worry about late payments again with our expert guides.
How an Invoice Is Stored: One Row per Line Item, Plus a Full Copy
A saved invoice is stored as one database row per line item, linked by a shared group ID, with a full copy of the invoice on every row. Saving an edit replaces all of those rows in one transaction.
How Business Profile Defaults Fill In New Invoices
Your business profile fills in your details, currency, tax rate, payment terms, and design on new blank invoices only. It never changes invoices you've already started, and only workspace admins can edit it.
How Your Active Workspace Is Chosen
If you belong to several workspaces, each request uses the one you selected. If you haven't selected one, it defaults to a workspace where you're admin, preferring the one you joined first. Here's how that's decided and checked.
What Your Client Receives When You Email an Invoice
The email is a short summary with the invoice number, issue date, due date, and total. It doesn't attach the PDF or include a link, and it comes from a no-reply address, so it helps to know what to send with it.
What Happens to Invoices You Create Without an Account
Without an account, saved invoices are kept in your browser's local storage, not on our servers. They aren't copied into an account when you sign up, and signing out of an account on that browser clears them.
Why Editing an Invoice Doesn't Update a Share Link You Already Sent
A share link stores a copy of the invoice as it was when you created the link. Later edits change your saved invoice, but anyone opening the old link still sees the old version, and so does the QR code on a re-downloaded PDF.
Why Sign-In Attempts Are Rate Limited
Sign-in, sign-up, two-factor checks, and verification resends share a budget of 10 attempts per hour per IP address, which is much stricter than the limit on ordinary app requests. Here's why the numbers differ.
How Sign-Up and Email Verification Actually Work
Creating an account sets up a personal workspace in the same database transaction, the verification link lasts 24 hours, and clicking an expired one quietly sends you a fresh link instead of leaving you stuck.
Deleting a Client Doesn't Touch Their Invoices
Saved clients are an address book, not a foreign key — invoices store billing details as their own inline copy, so deleting a client record leaves every invoice you've sent them completely intact.
What Happens When You Convert an Estimate to an Invoice
Converting doesn't turn the estimate into an invoice in place — it creates a brand-new invoice with a new ID and marks the original estimate as converted, permanently linking the two in both directions.
How Bulk "Mark as Paid" Actually Works
Selecting invoices and marking them paid in bulk doesn't edit a status field directly — it records an actual payment for whatever's still outstanding on each one, because a hand-edited status would get silently overwritten otherwise.
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