Getting paid starts with sending an invoice, and Eano gives you a few ways to create one depending on how you bill. Whether you’re sending a one-off bill for weekly progress, passing tracked costs through to a client, or collecting on a payment milestone, the invoice ends up in the same place — connected to your project’s finances, ready to send by email, text, or the client portal.

This article walks through the three ways to create an invoice and when each one makes sense.

All three live in the project’s Finance tab, and all three produce the same kind of professional invoice — with a preview, PDF, custom message, attachments, and optional credit card fee pass-through.

A manual invoice is the most flexible option — perfect for projects that don’t run on milestones, like billing for weekly progress or a custom service.

Open the Finance tab and click + New Invoice. Fill in the line items, descriptions, amounts, due date, and any notes or attachments you want the client to see. When it looks right, send it — or save it as a draft to finish later.

If you’d like the client to cover the card processing fee, toggle on the credit card fee pass-through while you’re building the invoice. Below the total, you’ll see a note showing exactly what the client will pay in fees, so there are no surprises. (For the full picture on how that works, see Credit Card Fees and Refunds.)

Every invoice needs a due date, and there are two ways to land on one. At the top of the invoice you’ll see three fields side by side: Date of issue, Payment terms, and Due on.

Payment terms is a dropdown of the standard accounting presets — the same ones your client’s bookkeeper already knows:

Pick a preset and Eano does the arithmetic for you. No more counting forward on a calendar to figure out what thirty days from Thursday is.

The clock starts when the invoice is finalized, not when you started drafting it. So if you build a draft on the 1st, sit on it for a week, and send it on the 8th, Net 30 means thirty days from the 8th. While a preset is selected, the Due on box reads (Save for date) — that’s Eano telling you the real date gets stamped on at the moment you save.

Choose Custom and the Due on box is yours to fill in by hand. The two controls stay in step with each other: pick a date manually and the dropdown snaps to Custom on its own; pick a preset afterward and the date you’d typed clears out, because the preset is now in charge. You never end up with a term and a date that disagree.

Eano also remembers what your team used last. Most contractors bill on the same terms every single time, so this is usually a set-it-once field — your next invoice opens on the terms you picked before. A brand-new team starts on Net 7.

When you’ve used one of the presets, the invoice your client receives shows both the computed Due on date and a Payment terms line naming the preset — “Net 30” spelled right out. It carries onto the PDF copy too. That’s the whole advantage of standard terms: everyone reads them the same way.

A custom due date just shows the date, with no terms line — there’s no standard name to give it.

If you’ve already been tracking income and expenses on a project, you don’t have to retype any of it. You can build an invoice straight from those existing items — which keeps your billing tied directly to your project finances.

In the Finance tab, under Income or Expenses, click + New Invoice to open a new draft. In the invoice builder, open the item selector and choose from what you’ve already tracked — scope-related income items and tracked expense items both show up, so you can pull in one or several at once. Each becomes a line item with its description and amount already filled in and linked back to the original record.

Your project’s payment milestones show up in that same item selector too, labeled Income from Milestone. Pulling one in lets you bill for part of a milestone before the phase is finished — handy for AIA-style progress billing where you’ve made headway on several milestones at once. The amount you collect is tracked back against the milestone. There’s a full walkthrough in Billing Partial Progress Against a Milestone.

Review the pulled-in lines, confirm pricing and the due date, add your markup or any extra lines, and send. Because each line stays connected to the underlying financial item, your reporting stays accurate. This is the backbone of cost-plus billing — there’s a dedicated walkthrough in Billing on a Cost-Plus Basis.

On fixed-price jobs billed against a schedule, Eano does the work for you. Whenever you create or update a payment milestone with an amount, it generates a linked invoice automatically — a full, professional one, not just a number.

Open your project’s Milestones tab, click a milestone, and select Preview Invoice. From the preview you can see the full layout, confirm the amount, check taxes or fees, and download the PDF.

Before sending, you can customize the message to the client, add notes or instructions, attach photos or documents, and turn on credit card fee pass-through — the same options you get on any other invoice.

For setting up the schedule itself, see Setting Up Your Payment Schedule.

However you create it, an invoice moves through three states:

My due date field says “(Save for date)” instead of a date. Is something wrong?

Nothing’s wrong. That’s what the Due on box shows while a relative preset like Net 30 is selected. The due date is calculated from the day the invoice is finalized, so it can’t be pinned down until you save. Save the invoice and the real date appears.

I chose Net 30 but the due date isn’t thirty days from when I created the draft.

That’s by design. Terms count from finalization, not from when you opened the draft — which matches how the rest of the accounting world treats them. A draft that sat around for a week gets its thirty days starting from the day you actually sent it.

Can I change the terms after I’ve sent the invoice?

No. Once an invoice is finalized, the terms and due date are locked in and shown as read-only — the invoice is a record at that point. While it’s still a draft you can change them freely. If a finalized invoice has the wrong terms, void it and issue a corrected one.

Do payment terms change anything besides the due date?

Not today. Picking Net 30 is a shortcut for calculating the due date and a label your client can read on the invoice. It doesn’t trigger separate reminders or late fees — everything downstream still runs off the due date itself.

Is the payment terms picker on the mobile app?

Not yet — it’s on the web app for now.

Which way should I use? Use a manual invoice for custom or progress billing, build from income and expense items when you’ve tracked costs you want to bill (cost-plus), and let a payment milestone generate the invoice on a fixed-price schedule. They all produce the same kind of invoice.

Can I pass the credit card fee to my client? Yes, on any invoice. Toggle on the credit card fee pass-through while building it, and a note below the total shows what the client will pay. See Credit Card Fees and Refunds for details.

Do I have to retype expenses to bill for them? No. Create the invoice from your Income and Expenses and pull the tracked items straight in — description and amount come with them, linked back to the original record.

Can I save an invoice and finish it later? Yes. Save it as a draft. Drafts stay editable, don’t notify the client, and don’t count in your financials until you finalize them.

How do I cancel an invoice I already sent? Void it. Finalized invoices can’t be deleted, but voiding cancels the invoice, removes it from your totals, and leaves a clear record for your books.