Tutorial 5 — Issue a proper invoice

Time: about 10 minutes. You will create a numbered invoice, send it as a PDF, and record a deposit against it.

An invoice is for when a customer needs something formal to pay against: a company paying a supplier, a landlord paying for repairs, a customer who wants a receipt with your business details on it. For everyday walk-in sales, a sale is enough — see Record your first sale →.

Owner only. Staff cannot see or create invoices. This is deliberate — invoices carry your bank details and your prices.

Before you start

Your invoice prints your logo, your address and your bank details. If those are not set up yet, the PDF will look bare and your customer will have nowhere to send the money.

Go to Settings → Business profile and fill in:

• ✅ Business address
• ✅ Logo
• ✅ Bank name, account number, account name

Then come back. It is ten minutes now, and it saves a customer saying "where do I pay this?" later.

Part 1 — Create the invoice

Go to Invoices → New invoice.

Who is it for?

Link the contact if you have one. It is what keeps the invoice and the customer's running balance connected.

What are you billing for?

Add at least one line. Each line is:

You can add as many lines as you need.

The money

NairaFlow works the total out for you:

Subtotal         ₦500,000
Tax                    ₦0
Shipping               ₦0
Less discount          ₦0
─────────────────────────────
Total             ₦500,000

You can add tax, shipping and a discount if they apply. Everything is a flat naira amount — NairaFlow does not calculate percentages for you, because what you actually charged is often not what a percentage would give.

When is it due?

Set a due date if there is one. It prints on the invoice, and it is what you sort by when you are chasing.

Making it recurring?

For a monthly retainer, set recurring and choose weekly, monthly or quarterly. NairaFlow will then be able to generate the next one for you.

One honest caveat: recurring invoices are built, but the generation step is per-business — it is not an automatic monthly sweep across the platform yet. For now, you create each one, or you ask NairaFlow support to generate them for you. Do not promise a customer that it will appear on the 1st by itself.

Save

Your invoice is numbered automatically — INV-001, then INV-002, and so on. Your numbering is your own; another business's invoices are numbered separately.

The invoice starts as Pending.

Part 2 — Send it

From the invoice, you can:

Sending it on WhatsApp: download the PDF or the image and send it like any other message. It is the single most useful thing in this tutorial for a business that sells to other businesses.

A note on the PDF limit. Your plan includes a number of invoice PDFs per month — 10 on Essential, 50 on Growth, unlimited on Enterprise. The count is checked when you generate a PDF. If you hit the limit, NairaFlow will tell you which one you hit.

Part 3 — Record a payment

When the money arrives, open the invoice and tap Record payment.

The status moves

"Deposit" is the normal middle state — a customer who pays ₦250,000 of a ₦500,000 invoice today and the rest next month. NairaFlow records exactly that.

What happens automatically

A sale is recorded for you. The money that arrived is written into your cash book as a sale, so your reports include it.

This is the one thing to be careful about. If you invoice a customer and separately record a sale for the same thing, you have counted it twice. Pick one:

• Invoiced it → just record the payment on the invoice. Done.
• Sold it → just record a sale. Done.

Both routes are complete on their own. Doing both doubles your revenue for that transaction.

You cannot overpay. A payment larger than the balance is refused, not quietly trimmed. If the customer genuinely paid more, record the difference as a separate transaction or a refund.

Part 4 — When something goes wrong

Cancelling an invoice

Cancel is available on an invoice where nothing has been paid. It marks the invoice as void rather than deleting it, so the record — and the number — stays consistent.

An invoice with payments on it cannot be cancelled. That is deliberate: money arrived against it, and the history should show that.

Editing an invoice

You can edit a Pending invoice. Once it is Paid or Void, it is locked — it is a document that has been issued.

You cannot set the status yourself

NairaFlow decides the status from what has been paid. There is no status picker, and that is intentional — a status you set by hand can disagree with the money.

Part 5 — Invoices and shortlets

If you rent apartments, an invoice can be linked to a booking, which is how the booking screen shows what has been paid and what is outstanding.

Do not pay twice. Recording a payment on the booking and recording one on the invoice creates two records of the same money. The link between them is documentation, not a sync — pick one route.

See By business type → for the full shortlet workflow.

What you have now

Formal, numbered, printable invoices that take deposits and land in your books.

Next: the part everyone actually wants — seeing what your business is doing.

→ Read your numbers →

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