The Complete Invoice Status Lifecycle, Explained

An invoice moves through a small, fixed set of statuses, and understanding which ones are "live" — recalculated automatically based on payments and dates — versus which ones are "locked" — set deliberately and never overwritten by automation — explains almost every question people have about why a status looks the way it does. This article walks through every status the system uses and exactly what causes each one.

The Live Statuses: Draft, Sent, Partially Paid, Overdue, Paid

These five statuses are not independently chosen — they're the output of a calculation the system runs every time something changes, based on the invoice's due date and the sum of payments matched against it.

• Draft is the starting state for an invoice that hasn't been sent yet. It stays draft until you send it, at which point it becomes sent — nothing else changes it out of draft on its own.
• Sent means the invoice has gone out but no qualifying condition below has been triggered yet: the due date hasn't passed, and no partial payment has been logged.
• Partially paid means at least one payment has been recorded against the invoice, but the total paid is still less than the invoice total. This is recalculated from scratch every time a payment is added, edited, or removed — it's not a flag someone sets, it's a live sum compared against the total.
• Overdue means the due date has passed and the amount paid still doesn't cover the total — whether that's zero payments or a partial amount that fell short.
• Paid means the amount paid meets or exceeds the invoice total. This is also a live calculation: the moment the sum of matched payments reaches the total, the status becomes paid, regardless of how many separate payments it took to get there.

Because these five are recalculated on every relevant change rather than being manually set, editing or deleting a logged payment can move an invoice backward — deleting a payment that had pushed an invoice to "paid" will drop it back to "partially paid" or "overdue" the next time the status is recalculated, since the underlying math no longer supports "paid."

The Locked Statuses: Cancelled, Archived, Approved, Rejected, Converted

These five statuses represent a deliberate decision made about the document's lifecycle, not a reflection of how much money has arrived. Once an invoice is in one of these states, payment activity does not overwrite the status — the automatic recalculation described above explicitly skips any invoice sitting in a locked state.

• Cancelled and archived are both terminal, deliberately-set states meant to remove a document from active billing tracking without deleting it outright.
• Approved and rejected apply specifically to estimates going through client review — the client's decision, not a payment event, drives these.
• Converted applies when an approved estimate has been turned into an invoice; the estimate itself is marked converted so it's clear it already served its purpose and isn't sitting around looking like it still needs action.

This separation exists so that automated systems — the payment recalculation, the overdue reminder sweep, the late fee sweep — all treat a locked status as a hard stop. An archived invoice with an old, technically-passed due date will never get flagged as overdue, because "archived" was a decision someone made on purpose, and no automated process is allowed to second-guess that decision based on dates or amounts.

Why a Manually-Forced "Paid" Label Can Silently Revert

If you were to bypass logging an actual payment and just set an invoice's status to paid directly, that label isn't stable, because it isn't one of the locked statuses — it's one of the five live ones. The next time anything triggers a recalculation (another payment logged, an existing one edited, a routine background pass), the system re-sums the actual matched payments against the invoice total. If that sum doesn't cover the total — because no real payment record backs up the label — the status reverts to whatever the math actually supports, typically back to overdue or sent. The reliable way to get an invoice into a paid state that stays paid is to log the payment itself; the status then follows automatically and stays consistent under future recalculation, because the math genuinely supports it.

Frequently Asked Questions

Can I move a cancelled invoice back to sent? Locked statuses are meant to represent a final decision, so there's no automatic path back to a live status. If a cancelled invoice needs to become active again, the practical approach is usually to create a fresh invoice rather than trying to reactivate the cancelled one.

Does archiving an invoice affect whether late fees or reminders apply to it? No — archived is a locked status, so it's explicitly excluded from both the overdue reminder sweep and the late fee sweep, regardless of its due date or balance.

If I delete a partial payment, does the invoice go back to exactly the status it had before that payment? Not necessarily "before" — it's recalculated fresh based on whatever payments remain and the current due date. If other payments still exist after the deletion, the invoice will show whatever status the remaining total and due date actually produce, which may or may not match its status at any specific earlier point in time.