How to keep track of invoices and payments

Last updated: September 2026

The problem is reconciliation, not invoicing

Writing an invoice is easy. Knowing, on a Tuesday, exactly which ones are unpaid and how late they are is the hard part, and it is the part a spreadsheet does worst.

The usual setup has the invoice in one place, the payment in the bank, and the link between them in your head. So the question “has the Hartley job been paid?” becomes a search through a statement for an amount that may have arrived in two parts, from a name that does not match the customer.

Every hour spent on that is unpaid work, and worse, it means chasing gets skipped. Nobody chases a debt they are not certain about.

Four things that make it tractable

• One numbering series, allocated by the system. Sequential, unique, never reused, and fixed at the moment the invoice is issued rather than when it was drafted.
• The invoice raised from the job. Same customer, same address, same agreed figure. Retyping from a quote is how a job gets billed at last year’s price.
• Part payments recorded against the invoice, not netted off in your head. Half now and half on completion is normal in the trades, and it is where most spreadsheets fall apart.
• A single place that answers “who owes me”. Not a filter you rebuild each time. A number you can look at.

Get the status vocabulary right

Four states cover almost everything: drafted, issued, part paid, paid. A fifth, cancelled or credited, matters more than people expect, because the wrong answer to “how do I undo an invoice” is deleting it.

An issued invoice is a business record. If it was wrong, the correct move is to void it while it is unpaid, or raise a credit note once it has been paid. Deleting it leaves a hole in your numbering and a question you cannot answer at year end.

Settling that vocabulary before you settle on software saves you from tools that let you edit an issued invoice, which is convenient right up until the moment it is not.

Where Dispatch fits

Invoices in Dispatch are raised from the job, so the customer, the address and the work already agreed carry across. The engineer can draft on site; issuing is an office act, and issuing is what allocates the number permanently from the business’s own INV series. There is a catalogue of your common charges to tap rather than retype, and VAT is handled by band.

Once issued, the invoice is emailed as a branded PDF with your logo on it, and the customer opens a private link to read it and pay by card. The money goes into the business’s own account, not into a middleman’s. Bank, cash and cheque payments are recorded against the invoice too, including part payments, so the balance outstanding is the invoice’s own number rather than a subtraction you do in your head.

Void while unpaid, credit note once paid, refunds where a card payment needs reversing: the awkward cases have a route that does not involve deleting anything. And the dashboard carries a tile for outstanding invoices and one for jobs that are finished but not yet invoiced, which between them answer the Sunday-evening question in about four seconds.

What it will not do

It is not an accounts package and does not pretend to be. There is no bank feed and no automatic reconciliation against your statement: a payment is recorded when someone records it, or automatically when the customer pays by card through the link.

It does not connect to an accounting package either. What it does is export a CSV of your records, which you import into whatever you or your accountant use, including for Making Tax Digital purposes. Nothing is sent to HMRC by the app.

One invoice covers one job, by design. If you bill a customer monthly for fifteen small jobs on one document, that is a genuine mismatch and worth knowing before you start.

The habit that beats the software

Invoice the day the job is completed. Not Friday, not month end. The single biggest cause of late payment in small trades businesses is late invoicing, and no amount of chasing recovers the three weeks you added yourself.

After that, decide your chasing sequence once and let it run rather than deciding each time who feels overdue enough to bother. Dispatch can email a customer automatically at 3, 10 and 21 days past the payment date, in your business name, once that setting is switched on in Settings, and it never chases an invoice you did not email in the first place.

The rest is judgement rather than software, and chasing unpaid invoices covers the wording that gets you paid without losing the customer.