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Schedule Date to Send Invoices
adamtenner
Member Posts: 2
Hi there. It would be great to have a way to schedule the emailing of invoices (besides for the recurring invoice feature.)
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adamtenner
Member Posts: 2
Hi there. It would be great to have a way to schedule the emailing of invoices (besides for the recurring invoice feature.)
Comments
I don't think so, @adamtenner, but I used a recurring invoice with a single repeat to do just that in the past.
I knew I had to send an invoice while I was on vacation out of the country, and I'm pretty sure my family would've gotten rid of me if I pulled out my computer. So I did the healthy thing and set everything up before leaving.
@adamtenner Thanks for the suggestion. How far in advance would you want to schedule the sending of that invoice? @Dante_Bulluck's suggestion is how I would accomplish that in Wave today. @Dante_Bulluck How did that work for you? Anything that was lacking in using that workaround?
I'd also like to schedule invoices. Recurring invoices don't work because it is only a second and final invoice I need to schedule, and the items and amount is different. I simply need to be able to set a date on each invoice to send. Right now, I create all of my invoices for a customer at the time of purchase (usually 2 payments but sometimes 3). I send the first one out immediately, and set the invoice date and due date for the appropriate future dates. The second one may go out anywhere from 1 to 6 months later. So I may take a $300 deposit today, have a $3300 payment due in December and a final payment of $3800 due in June.
Hi, @TimK.
You can actually do this with recurring invoices. Using your example, you would make one regular invoice and then a recurring invoice set to only create one invoice. Say you want to send this invoice on December 1st, its schedule would look like this:
Following the rules on this schedule, this Recurring invoice will send out one invoice a month starting on December 1st. Since it's scheduled to stop on December 2nd, it won't ever send out other invoices, essentially allowing you to schedule your invoice to be dated and sent out at any date in the future you'd like.
I suppose that works, but it still seems like this should be much simpler than creating a recurring invoice that recurs once. Basically, when we create an invoice we give it an invoice date and a due date.....really what you need is a "send date". Thanks for the workaround though.
I can recognize that it isn't the most intuitive way to approach this, @TimK. Thank you for the feedback! It means a lot that you're willing to take time to help us make Wave better
I think hacking the recurring is not a bad idea, but a simple feature that would ask when you want it sent - now, scheduled time, or recurring - would be ideal. Add to that a little place for a note would make it even sweeter.
As background, I was going to be out of the country and away from the internet (shudder) for a bit and I needed to make sure an invoice went out. It would have been great to know that the invoice and an email would go out when I wanted it to. In the end I downloaded the invoice and set it up through my own email account.
Thanks for throwing in on this @adamtenner. We really appreciate you taking the time to share your feedback!
I second this request - I had a bit of spare time to prepare a client invoice today, but didn't want to send it out until early next week, as we just concluded our signing yesterday. I just took it for granted that this would be an option, or would be the default behaviour when the invoice date was pushed out to the future, and was surprised to find out that this ultimately wasn't supported out of the box. Setting up a one-off recurring invoice is, of course, one workaround, but this is far more effort than should be necessary - by default the invoice should simply be sent out on the invoice date, and if this is in the future, sending delayed (or at least confirmed).
Thirding this request. My current "workaround" is to create the invoice, but not send it. Then when it's time, I adjust the dates, etc. Would prefer to just create, set the send date, and carry on.
> Thirding this request. My current "workaround" is to create the invoice, but not send it. Then when it's time, I adjust the dates, etc. Would prefer to just create, set the send date, and carry on.
I do the same thing. I create all the invoices in advance and don't send them. Then I set a reminder to send them later and change the invoice date. It's a real pain.
@pmundt @JordanQ @TimK Thanks for letting us know what works for you and what you would like to see improved. I'll be sure to pass this along to the Product Team for future consideration.
This is definitely a feature that would improve my workflow a lot. Please do consider implementing this feature in the near future.
Absolutely, scheduling invoice sending would be really useful. Recurring invoice workaround is useful to know, but the ability to schedule instead of sending on standard invoices would be excellent.
Typically are you looking to schedule next day or next week or much farther out into the future?
Under what circumstances do you find yourself wanting to schedule sending the invoice? When working after hours and not wanting to send until next business day or is it for some other reason? I'd like to understand the breadth of reasons so our team can look at this in more detail!
This request has been out for over a year and posted here for many months. While we appreciate you asking people how certain things would help in their daily operations, I think this one is pretty clear and has been spelled out numerous times. Regardless of the "why" and the "how", the bottom line is that being able to schedule an invoice in advance and choose a "send date" and a "due date" is really a must-have feature. If you produce a feature that allows pre-scheduled invoices, it doesn't matter how customers want to use them. There's no complexity. There's not a million different options people need. They want the current type of invoicing to be available with pre-set send and due dates. Just make it happen, it isn't rocket science.
Thanks @TimK,
There are complexities that may not be well understood. For example, what happens if customer details change between the time you create and the time you need to send? What should happen? There's also the invoice status which needs to change, and notifications when the invoice has been sent. What about when it fails? We try to gather as much information as needed when we research an idea so that it is simple and intuitive when we bring it to life.
The feedback you provide is appreciated, and I hope you can appreciate why we ask these questions. Our team is constantly looking at feedback and cycling back on feedback when we are researching new initiatives and planning the roadmap.
This is not something on our short term roadmap right now as we are focused on completing a large technical improvement to the invoicing platform, however, we are currently exploring a collection of improvements to the way sending emails with Wave work.
I understand that like any programming change that there are underlying challenges, but this really isn't that complicated of an improvement, and all of the things you mention are easily addressed. I realize that there are limited dollars and hours to work on improvements, but the fact that this isn't on your short term road map is incredibly frustrating. I can't think of a bigger flaw in Wave's invoicing system than this.
Completely agree with TimK. I do my invoice processing once a month (not always at the end of the month), but most of my clients will not receive an invoice until the actual invoice date. Why would it be so hard to schedule the invoice to be sent on a certain date? This would be like the new Scheduled Send function on Gmail (that has been in beta for a long time).
Because there is no scheduled send, I have absolutely missed sending invoices because I forgot to log in on the last day of the month to send the invoices. Is there some way to add this to the roadmap please? Your service is top notch, except for this one missing feature.
Thanks for the detailed feedback you've provided here @mling1. Our Sales Service team is currently exploring the addition of multiple features in their current roadmap for releasing. I've just directly messaged Product Liaison for this team to see if it's something that can be mentioned in one of their stand-ups for future discussion. Once again, I do appreciate the time you've taken to explain how this is affecting your business and how it can be improved with this feature.
I came to this forum to figure out how to schedule an invoice email. I figured I was missing something obvious in the invoice design or help files.
Wave must not consider this a legitimate feature request since it's been requested for over a year now with multiple people (add me) explaining why it is expected.
It is so glaringly obvious to anyone running a business why this is a necessary feature. It shocks me that this was not included originally, and even moreso that it is still not available.
Hi, we'd also find this feature hugely useful. Here's why: when entering into a service delivery agreement with a client we typically establish a payment schedule. This corresponds to various delivery dates and is therefore not necessarily regular in terms of cadence or amount. Upon contract signature we input the payment schedule into Wave, creating anything from three to twenty unique invoices corresponding to payment references in our agreement. Ideally, Wave would automatically send each invoice to our customer on the respective invoice date. As it stands, Wave relies on us logging in to the system and manually clicking send every single invoice date, necessitating calendar reminders (which requires yet more scheduling and data entry, all of which must be double-checked). All this is for one single client / project.
As is probably obvious from the above scenario, being able to set up invoices and schedule them in one go would be a big time-saver and significantly reduce the potential for mistakes. As others have said, it is surprising to learn that not only does Wave not support the feature, but also that it is not currently planned. Please do pass this use case on to the development team.
A final note regarding the complications mentioned above: if customer details are changed before the invoice is sent out, I would expect that the as-yet unsent invoices are updated to reflect this (perhaps with a warning when making the change). If the invoice fails to send, then a simple email notification would be sufficient. It is true that an additional invoice status of 'scheduled' would need to be added. This could be triggered if an (optional) 'send date' is filled during invoice creation. In settings, there could be an option to automatically populate 'send date' with the 'invoice date' if enabled.
Hope this helps, and goes some way to explain the kind of real-life scenario that would be greatly simplified by scheduling invoices to be sent. Thanks for the great product and your ongoing efforts to improve it.
I would like this feature as well. JRL's explanation above in terms of the invoice information updating since it hasn't been sent yet would be ideal.
For me, it's not quite as complicated as it's usually because I'm finalizing my invoices in the evening and would want them to send the next AM during regular working hours,
I could pull this off with the gmail send, but with so many gmail accounts, I can't tell which one I'm logged into when I choose send with gmail.
When I googled and found this thread, I was hoping this feature is already added since it was first requested one year ago. Please add this feature, it would help me greatly by being able to schedule the email out. Using the recurring feature is not letting me create my own invoice number which is important to me as I have different clients. I look forward to this feature in the near future.
Please add me to the list of users requesting (and perplexed by the lack of) this feature.
Hey @JRL! Thanks for taking the time to submit this feedback to us! This type of insight is super helpful for our team to reference when looking at features to implement. I have reached out for an update on this. To be transparent, this is not on the road map for the near future as the team are currently working on a few other feature releases, but hopefully this is something we can look at adding down the track.
Hi @jessicatc @em0304 @JimmyWilkins! Thank you for your input here as well!
It would be very helpful if invoicing had the option of setting a date on which the invoice should be sent automatically. This is useful in the case where an event has to first take place (such as training for instance) and the invoice need to be released after the event. Also in a situation where a once off needs to be sent off and staff know that they will be out of office for a prolonged time. Just a thought
Hey @Dries and welcome to Wave's Community Forum! I moved your comment into an ongoing discussion on the same topic. As you can see, this is definitely a feature idea that has been raised before in the past and that our Sales and Invoicing Product Team revisits frequently because of how popularly it is requested. I've reached out to the Product Team and at the moment it isn't a feature that is being actively discussed but they definitely do see the value. I have flagged this for the team so that as they continue to reassess the current roadmap, they can keep this thread in mind
Just adding my vote to the "please add this feature" list -- it would be very helpful! Actually, I have taken a quick peek at other software out there to see if any of them have this feature. I do not mean this to sound like a threat, because I appreciate your product, but it could be enough to make me jump platforms.