Invoices

Proper provides the invoicing flexibility you need to accommodate your customers' preferences, regardless of pricing model, payment terms, or frequency. You can create custom invoice lines, handle pro-rata upgrades and downgrades, issue credit notes, and manage renewals. Automate the sending of recurring invoices or generate one-off invoices on demand for your customers.

Invoice settings

Proper automatically generates invoices for all subscriptions you set-up according to the agreement with your customer. An invoice in Proper always features the following fields:

• Invoice line items, including accounting period, amount as well as tax, quantity, and custom description or discounts (if applicable)
• The subtotal of all invoice items together, the calculation of the tax and the resulting total.
• Names and addresses of your company and the payer.
• Invoice number in a sequential number sequence, making accounting and auditing easy
• Issue date meaning the date when the invoice is finalised and sent to the customer. The logic for this can be customised completely by you.
• Due date by when the payment needs to happen. Again, you decide what the logic for this should be.
• Payment method: Proper automatically adds the agreement’s unique bank account on each invoice sent to the customer.
• Company logo: Your logo so customers can quickly identify who the invoice is from.

Custom fields

Proper also allows you to configure additional custom data fields that should be displayed on the invoice. For instance, you can add a purchase order number and buyer reference if your customer requests these to be part of the invoice. Proper offers you the full flexibility to add this information on the level that makes sense to you - for example on the customer, agreement, or one specific invoice. Please note that any data put in on the upper (parent) levels (e.g. on the customer) will then be used on all invoices for this customer, unless it's specifically overwritten on a lower level (e.g. the invoice itself).

Example use case:

Your customer requests that the PO number "PO-1234" be included on their invoices for internal routing. This information can be added to the customer level, ensuring it appears on every invoice created for them. However, if one month they purchase a product outside of their regular subscription and it needs to be identified with "PO-2300", you can easily overwrite the PO field with the new information when creating a one-off invoice.

Custom memo and footer

You can further customise your invoice with a custom memo and custom footer. When set up, they will be shown in the invoice PDF. Memos are often used to display notes, like e.g. thanking the customer for their business. The footer is used for longer text and is displayed underneath the total of the invoice. It can include ​longer contractual or legally required text. Like the custom fields, you can define these for a specific invoice, or set them on the customer level to include them on all invoices sent to that customer.

Invoice creation

We will automatically create and send invoices to your customers - whenever you want us to. Proper puts all finalised subscriptions with the same issue and due date on one invoice. With Proper, you are able to charge any day during the month – and unlimited invoices per period. You can also decide when invoices should get issued. If you set autoAdvance = true, the invoice will automatically be issued after one hour. This gives you some time to edit the invoice before it is automatically sent. If you set autoAdvance = false, the invoice will stay in draft mode until you issue it manually.

The autoAdvance setting can be applied on customer, agreement or subscription level. This means you can easily set all subscriptions on a customer/agreement to manual issuing by setting autoAdvance = false. But if some subscriptions should be automatically invoiced, then those can still be set to autoAdvance = true on the specific subscription.

If you need to, you can also create one-off invoices to cover any ad-hoc requests. You can add unlimited line items, with fully customised periods, tax rates, and descriptions. There is also an option to add metadata for internal references. Once the invoice is ready, you can trigger it to be sent right away.

Please note that after an invoice is generated, changes to a subscription will not affect the created invoice. The same applies the other way around: If an invoice is changed, the subscription setup will not be affected.

Invoice numbering

We automatically generate sequential invoice numbers to help you keep track of the invoices you sent. When you switch to Proper, you can set a starting number, otherwise we default to 1 for your first invoice. You also have the option to define a prefix, e.g. PRP for Proper Payments. Then your invoices will be numbered PRP-1, PRP-2, PRP-3 etc.

You can update both the prefix and the next invoice number in your account settings. Please note that the next invoice number needs to be higher than the number of the latest invoice that was sent with Proper. This is to ensure that you will never have two invoices with the same number.

Invoice status

In Proper, invoices are always in one of the following statuses:

• Draft: the invoice is not issued yet and can still be edited.
• Open: the invoice has been issued to the customer. Note: to get an overview of overdue invoices, you can use the list invoices endpoint (opens in a new tab) and filter by isOverdue.
• Paid: the invoice has been settled completely. Either due to a payment or because the full amount has been refunded.
• Void: the invoice is made invalid, but it is still visible in your system and can be used for auditing.

E-invoicing

The Proper platform includes the ability to send e-invoices automatically. E-invoicing is a digital way of sending invoices, enabling businesses to automate payment processing. After enabling e-invoicing on an agreement, Proper will automatically send e-invoices or e-credit notes to the customer’s European Article Number (EAN), also known as a Global Location Number (GLN).

Send compliant e-invoices (eInvoices) anywhere in Europe with our PEPPOL European standard solution. We also support specific local networks such as Denmark’s NemHandel and Germany’s ZUGFeRD. Let us know if you wish any other local network.