Recurring invoices and subscriptions

Two related ways to bill on a schedule instead of once: a recurring invoice is a template that raises a fresh invoice automatically; a subscription is the retainer agreement behind ongoing work, which the customer accepts before it starts billing.

Recurring invoices, reached from the Invoices screen: a template — lines, a customer, a frequency — that is never itself an invoice; it carries no number and sits in no ledger until it produces one. Each run creates a real, numbered invoice from the template. Status is Active, Paused, or Ended, and you can see when it last ran, when it runs next, and how many cycles are left if you set a limit.

Subscriptions, the "Subscriptions" screen: a retainer your customer has agreed to, billed on its own cycle. Status moves from Draft, to Pending while it waits for the customer's acceptance, to Active once accepted, and on to Paused, Cancelled or Ended. Two things are shown without being a status of their own: Scheduled (accepted but its first billing cycle has not run yet) and In arrears (a child invoice it produced is overdue) — both worked out fresh each time, never stored.

When you would use each: a recurring invoice for billing you control entirely from your side; a subscription where the customer's own agreement to the ongoing charge matters — a retainer, a plan, anything you would want a record of them having said yes to.

What happens next: either one keeps producing ordinary invoices, which behave exactly like any other invoice from that point — send, pay, credit, all the same.

When it refuses: pausing or ending either one stops it from producing further invoices; nothing it has already produced is touched. A role that can only see its own invoices sees only the schedules and subscriptions tied to its own customers.