Creating and Managing Invoices

Where invoicing happens

The Invoices page (/invoices) is the ledger of every invoice your clinic has ever raised, across every location and patient. It's the page most front-desk staff live in during the billing part of their day: opening a completed appointment to bill it, chasing an outstanding balance, or pulling up an old invoice a patient is asking about.

Every invoice is built and edited in the Invoice Drawer, a side panel that slides in over the list without navigating away from it. Inside the drawer, the Line Item Builder is where the actual billing detail lives — the services, products, quantities, and per-line tax that make up what the patient owes.

The Invoices list page showing the search bar, status and location filters, and a table of invoices with patient, status, and total columns.

Finding an invoice in the list

The invoice list is built to answer two different questions well: what does this specific patient owe, and what does my clinic's billing look like right now. The search bar handles the first — searching by patient name or invoice number narrows the list to a handful of rows almost immediately, which matters when a patient is standing at the desk waiting.

The filters handle the second. Filtering by status (paid, outstanding, draft) is the fastest way to see what still needs collecting, and filtering by location matters as soon as your clinic runs more than one site — without it, the list mixes invoices from every location together, which makes end-of-day reconciliation harder than it needs to be.

• <strong>Search bar</strong> — matches by patient name or invoice number.
• <strong>Status filter</strong> — narrows to paid, outstanding, or draft invoices.
• <strong>Location filter</strong> — restricts the list to a single clinic location.
• Click any row to open that invoice in the <strong>Invoice Drawer</strong>, whether you're reviewing, editing, sending, or recording payment against it.

Building an invoice

A new invoice starts empty and is assembled one line item at a time. Each line represents a single billable service or product, its quantity, and the tax that applies to it — there's no invoice-level tax setting in ClinyPal, so the line item is where tax decisions actually get made. Getting the line items right the first time matters more than it might seem: once an invoice has been sent or paid, correcting a wrong quantity or a missing tax rate means reopening it and re-sending, which patients notice.

The Invoice Drawer open with the Line Item Builder expanded, showing a service picker, quantity field, and per-line tax rate selector.

Common line-item mistakes worth watching for

• <strong>Wrong quantity on multi-unit products</strong> — easy to miss when a visit includes several units of the same retail product rather than a single service.
• <strong>Tax rate left on a stale default</strong> — if the last invoice you built used a tax-exempt line, check that the rate didn't carry over incorrectly to a taxable item on the next one.
• <strong>Discount applied before checking eligibility</strong> — confirm a promotion's date range and conditions actually cover this invoice before applying it; see <a href="/billing-payments/promotions-settings/">Promotions (Settings)</a> for how promotions are scoped.
• <strong>Missing line items from add-on services</strong> — if a practitioner added an extra service during the visit, it needs its own line; it won't appear automatically.

Applying discounts and promotions

Discounts on an invoice come in two forms: a one-off amount or percentage entered directly on the invoice, or a promotion your clinic has pre-configured in Promotions (Settings). Reach for a configured promotion whenever the same discount gets used repeatedly — a seasonal offer, a referral discount, a loyalty rate — since it's tracked consistently and reportable afterward. Reserve one-off discounts for genuinely one-time situations, like a goodwill adjustment for a specific patient.

Marking paid, sending, and printing

Once an invoice is saved, it's a live record — you can send it to the patient by email, print or export it as a PDF, or move straight to collecting payment against it.

• <strong>Send</strong> emails the invoice to the patient using your clinic's invoice email settings and templates.
• <strong>Record payment</strong> takes you into the payment flow for that invoice — see <a href="/billing-payments/recording-payments/">Recording Payments</a>.
• <strong>Print / export PDF</strong> generates a printable copy for physical records, in-person handover, or manual delivery outside ClinyPal's email.

An invoice's paid status reflects payments actually recorded against it, in full — a partial payment leaves it outstanding with the remaining balance shown. That's deliberate: it keeps the invoice list an honest reflection of what's actually been collected, rather than something staff have to remember to update manually.

Per-visit vs. batched invoicing

Clinics generally settle into one of two invoicing rhythms. Per-visit invoicing — raising the invoice at checkout, right after the appointment — keeps the patient's balance current and lets you collect payment while they're still at the desk, which is the simplest way to avoid an accumulating outstanding balance. Batched invoicing — raising invoices for the day's completed appointments in one pass at close of business — suits clinics with a dedicated billing step separate from checkout, or practitioners who finalize notes after the visit and don't want to invoice until the note is locked.

If you batch, keep an eye on the Uninvoiced Appointments report so nothing slips through — a completed appointment that never gets an invoice raised against it is revenue your clinic simply never collects.

A completed invoice showing patient details, line items with per-line tax, an applied promotion, and the grand total, ready to send or print.

Frequently asked questions