Create and Send a Recurring Invoice

General

Autobooks allows you to create invoices (both one-time and recurring) to send to your business' customers via email. These invoices can then be paid electronically either with a credit or debit card or by an ACH (bank account transfer) payment.

Please note that this article is strictly showing the recurring invoicing process. To review how to create a one-time invoice, please click here to review the How to create and send a new invoice article. 

How to create and send a recurring invoice

When you're creating a recurring invoice, what you're actually doing is setting up a schedule that our application will follow for creating invoices on behalf of your business. 

This process begins by first creating a standard invoice by taking the below steps:

• Go to Invoicing from the left-hand navigation menu

• Click on Recurring Schedules

• Click the [+New recurring schedule] button

• From the Create an Invoice page, fill out the appropriate information for this new invoice

• Please note that fields marked with a red asterisk* are required

• Customer – This is the person or business that you would like to send this invoice to. Clicking this field will bring up a drop-down menu where you can search for the appropriate customer to bill. If the customer in question has not yet been added into your business' Autobooks account, you can do so by clicking the [+ New customer] option from this menu. 

If you would like to learn more about adding a customer, please click here to view the How to Add a Customer article

• Frequency - Weekly/ Bi-weekly/ Monthly
  • Weekly/Bi-Weekly - For these options, you will choose the day of the week that you would like your invoice sent out 
  • Monthly - You will choose the 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th, or Last specific day of the month to send the invoice (for example, the 3rd Tuesday of the month)
    • You can also choose a specific date (the 17th, for example) of the month to send the invoice
• Start date - The date that you would like this recurring schedule to begin
• Days until due - How many days between the send date of the invoice until the invoice is due
•  Frequency option - # of times/ End date
  • # of times - how many total times you would like this recurring invoice to be sent
  • End date - the end date of this recurring invoice schedule (meaning after that date, this will no longer run) 
• Product/Service – This is the product your business is selling or the service your business is providing as part of this invoice. By default, only one product/service will be available for your business. You can add additional products/services that are specific for your business by clicking the [+ New product] option from this drop-down menu.

If you would like to learn more about how or why to add a new Product/Service for your business, please click here to view the How to Add a Product/Service article

• Quantity (Qty) – This field is for showing the number of products this invoice is for, or the amount of service provided.
• Price – This field is where you can enter in the amount for the Product/Service you are providing.

Please note that the Amount field is an automatic calculation that is based on the Quantity times unit Price. 

• Description (optional) – If you need to add in more details about a specific Product/Service, you can do so in this field.
• [+Add item] (optional) – If there is a second (or third, or fourth, or...) Product or Service that you need to add to this invoice, you can insert a new line item by clicking this button.
• Message (optional) – If there is anything else that you would like to relay to the customer receiving this invoice, you can add longer messages in this field.

• After you have filled out all of the necessary fields, you can click the [Send invoice] to finish the creation of this recurring invoice schedule.

Please note that since recurring invoices cannot be created for the same day, the earliest this schedule would start (and subsequently send out an invoice) would be tomorrow. 

• You can click the Preview invoice option to view what your customer will see when opening this invoice from the email they will receive.