Send an invoice to a contact

This article explains how to send a customer an invoice that you've created in FreeAgent.

You can set up FreeAgent to automatically email new invoices, invoice reminders and thank you notes to your customer. Alternatively, you can follow the steps below to email the invoice to your customer manually.

Before you can email an invoice, make sure that the customer you’re sending the invoice to has been added as a contact in FreeAgent.

If you’re not sending the invoice to your customer using FreeAgent, you can save the invoice as a PDF.

Find the invoice

Navigate to the ‘Work’ tab at the top of the screen and select ‘Invoicing’ from the drop-down menu.

Select the reference number of the relevant invoice.

Email the invoice using FreeAgent

To email this invoice to your customer manually using FreeAgent, select ‘Send by Email’.

This will bring up the 'Email Invoice' screen to allow you to enter your content.

Build your content

You can use the 'Email Tags' listed on the right to build the content for the 'To', 'Subject' and 'Content' boxes if you wish.

Where the invoice email is sent from

Select the email address you’d like the invoice email to be sent from using the ‘From’ drop-down menu. The email can be sent from any user who has been set up in FreeAgent as long as their email address is verified. If you’d like a copy of the invoice email to be sent to the sender, select the ‘Email a copy to Sender’ tick box.

Where the invoice email is sent to

If you entered an email address for the customer when adding them as a contact, this will automatically be populated in the ‘To’ field. Otherwise, you’ll need to enter their email address. If you’d like to send the invoice to more than one recipient, you can manually enter multiple email addresses into the ‘To’ field, ensuring that each is separated by a comma.

Alternatively, you could enter either the '[contact_billing_email],[contact_email]' or ‘[billing_or_contact_email]’ tag in the ‘To’ field. This will insert the email address of the customer based on their contact or billing details in FreeAgent. Please note that if you enter the ‘[contact_billing_email],[contact_email]’ tag in the ‘To’ field, the email will go to both email addresses. If you only want to send the email to one address or the other, enter the [billing_or_contact_email] tag.

Subject line and attachments

The email ‘Subject’ field will include your business’s name and the invoice reference number by default, but you can overwrite this if you wish.

The invoice that you're sending the customer will be attached to that email as a PDF.

To attach other files to the invoice email, select ‘Attach Files’ and choose a file from your company files in FreeAgent or upload a file from your computer. Please note that attachments over 7MB will be compressed into a zip file and a download link will be included in the body of the email. After 120 days the download link will expire.

If the invoice is for a project and you've attached receipts to the costs that you're billing to your customer, you can choose to attach those receipts to the invoice email.

To do this, select the 'Attach [X] Expense Receipt(s)' box next to the ‘Attach Files’ link. This will attach all your receipts up to a maximum combined file size of 10MB.

Body of the message

The main body of the email is captured in the ‘Content’ section. Default sample text will be provided and your FreeAgent referral link will be included with a tag that will use your own specific referral code as part of this sample text. You can edit or replace this text and use the email tags on the right to customise the email for your customer. Find out how to style your Invoice and Estimate emails.

Adding a payment button to your invoice emails

If you've enabled an online payment option and would like to add a payment button to your invoice emails, select the checkbox next to 'Include online payment button below content'.

You can also add a payment link to the bottom of the invoice.

Preview the invoice

Below the email template, you can view a preview of the invoice so that you can double-check it before you send it.

Once you're happy with the invoice and the email, select ‘Send Email’ to send it to your customer.

Viewing the email history

Below the invoice you'll find a history of all the emails FreeAgent has sent in relation to this invoice, along with their status. The status will either be ‘Sent’, ‘Bounced’, ‘Blocked’ or ‘Delivered’. Please note that you won’t see the ’Invoice Email History’ section if the invoice was marked as sent or if the invoice was emailed before this feature was available.

This can help you identify whether your customer has received the invoice or whether your customer’s email server has blocked it.

You’ll also receive a notification if your email has bounced or been blocked so you can try sending it again.

Sharing a payment link

If you've enabled an online payment option and would like to share the payment link with your customer rather than sending the invoice, select ‘Share payment link’ in the 'Online payments' panel on the right. Please note that this option will only be available if you selected an online payment option when creating the invoice.

In the pop-up window, select ‘Copy’, or ‘Mark as sent & create link’ if the invoice is currently in ‘Draft’ status, and paste the link into your preferred app to share with your customer.

You can also add a payment link to the bottom of the invoice to make it even easier for your customers to pay.