Emails

Email sending and receiving is a key component to an effective billing system. Here you can learn more about how email sending works on Invoiced.

We have built many features around sending and email to make billing less stressful.

Anyone that has billed customers before has probably heard the "I never received it" excuse, at least once. Sometimes it is true that the client never received the invoice. We built view tracking to to solve this problem.

All invoices have what is known as the Client View. The client view renders the full document in the recipient's web browser and supports several features, like online payments, PDF downloads, commenting, file attachments, and more. The client view is hosted on your Customer Portal.

Sending invoices have a View Invoice button that links to the client view. As soon as your client clicks the view button we log it and notify you.

Note: we have taken precautions to prevent false alerts should you open the client view of your own invoice.

We log and track every message sent to customers from Invoiced. When it comes to billing, it's super important to be able to look up past communications with your customer. Within the dashboard you can see precisely what messages were sent to customers, when, and by whom. We track opens and clicks (for invoices and other transactions).

Invoiced allows you to completely whitelabel your billing emails by sending through your email domain. All you need to send customer emails from your own email domain are SMTP credentials. Keep reading to learn how to set up email whitelabeling.

We also have a partnership with Gmail that will give special treatment to the invoices you send to Gmail users. Your clients will see a View Invoice next to the subject line that takes them straight to the client view without ever needing to open the email. We've seen an uptick in views and paid invoices with this integration.

Invoiced has a built-in shared mailbox for billing and accounts receivable teams to manage customer communications. You can learn more in our A/R Inbox guide.

Our default email templates were written to be professional and clearly communicate important billing information to your client, however, we understand these defaults do not work for everyone. It's easy to change the default email templates we use for emails.

The email templates are rendered using Invoiced Template Language. Our template language makes it easy to customize emails with variables ({{customer_name}} as an example). You can also take advantage of more advanced logic to create highly personalized emails. Please consult the Invoiced Template Language documentation to learn more.

In order to customize any of the email templates go to Settings → Emails in the dashboard. You can edit or create email templates from that page.

New Invoice - Used when an outstanding invoice is sent to a customer for the first time, or when a manually collected invoice is generated from a subscription. Includes a View Invoice button and a PDF attachment of the invoice.

Invoice Reminder - Used for outstanding invoices that have already been sent but are not past due yet. Includes a View Invoice button and a PDF attachment of the invoice.

Late Payment Reminder - Used for past due invoices. Includes a View Invoice button and a PDF attachment of the invoice.

Thank You - Used for invoices that have been paid in full. Includes a PDF attachment of the invoice. Turned off by default.

Payment Plan Onboarding - Sent when there is a customer has a new payment plan that they need to approve. Turned off by default.

Credit Note - Used for credit notes that have been issued. Includes a View Credit Note button and a PDF attachment of the credit note.

Payment Receipt - Used for payment receipts. Includes a PDF attachment with the receipt and the invoices associated with that payment on separate pages.

Refund - Send when a charge-type payment is refunded. Includes a PDF attachment with the receipt and the invoices associated with that refund on separate pages.

Failed AutoPay Attempt - Sent when a payment attempt on an AutoPay invoice fails. Includes an Update Payment Info button.

Statement - Used to send customer statements. Includes a View Statement button and a PDF attachment of the statement.

Sign Up Confirmation - Sent to confirm a customer has been signed up to a subscription. Includes a Manage Subscription button. Turned off by default.

Billed Soon - Sent to notify a customer their subscription will be billed soon. You specify how many days in advance of the next bill date to send these notices. Includes a Manage Subscription button. Turned off by default.

Cancellation - Sent to confirm a customer's subscription has been canceled. Turned off by default.

Estimate - Used to send estimates. Includes a View Statement button.

Out of the box, Invoiced will send emails to your customers using our carefully tuned email infrastructure. Emails will appear as if they came directly from your business, but the sending email address will be "[email protected]"

Sending via Invoiced's email servers works just fine for most businesses, and it requires zero set up. However, some businesses might run into deliverability issues when sending to customers with strict spam filters. This issue can be more common when sending to large corporations. If you run into deliverability issues, you can ask your customer to whitelist "[email protected]", although this is not always ideal.

The recommended solution would be to configure Invoiced to send email through your email domain. The setup process is about the same level of difficulty as setting up your work email on a new email client or mobile device. Once enabled, Invoiced will send any customer emails through your email server using your email address as the sender instead of [email protected]. This can have a significant improvement on email delivery for your customers. Instead of receiving email from a third party (Invoiced), it comes directly from you.

In order to send email using your email domain you must configure Invoiced with your email gateway (also known as SMTP gateway).

Emails will now be sent through the SMTP gateway you entered. You can test this out by sending an invoice to yourself and checking if the sender address matches your company address.

Since emails will be sent with your business email address as the sender please make sure that your SMTP gateway is properly configured for this. Your SMTP gateway must also support TLS or SSL encryption in order to be used with Invoiced.

If we are unable to connect to the gateway for any reason when sending email then we will failover to our email servers. This is a setting which can be disabled if you prefer for outgoing email to only be permitted through your email infrastructure.

You can send through a Google email account using SMTP. However, an additional step is required to authenticate your account.

You can verify the SMTP gateway is working by checking your Sent folder in Gmail. You should see emails sent through Invoiced in there.

Below is a list of IP addresses that outgoing emails will come from when handing off emails to your SMTP server. This can be useful if you need to whitelist the IP addresses that you will receive outgoing emails from in your firewall rules. Please be aware that these IP addresses are subject to change.

Invoiced provides tracking for bounced emails. An email can bounce for a spectrum of reasons from sending to a non-existent email address to the recipient's mailbox being full. When Invoiced receives a returned email we will add it to the corresponding email thread in your A/R Inbox.

The availability of a bounce notification is entirely dependent on the recipient's email provider. If the recipient's email provider does not notify Invoiced about the failed delivery then there will be no indication on Invoiced that the bounce occurred. Given the asynchronous nature of email, you might immediately see that an email has bounced or it might take several hours.

If you are sending through your own email server (recommended) instead of through Invoiced's email infrastructure, then bounce notifications will go to the sender's email address, which would be the email address in Settings → Email → Delivery Settings. If you do not have email forwarding set up for your A/R Inbox then the notification will be sent to your company email address.

Invoiced can automatically send out new invoices for you. It's as easy as flipping a switch! This works for invoices, estimates, payment plans, and credit notes.

Here is how you set it up:

Now any new invoice will be sent automatically that meets these criteria:

Please note there is a 5 minute delay between when an invoice is issued and when the system sends it out. This delay is intentional to give you padding in case a correction needs to be made. If you send out the invoice or mark it as sent before the system has sent it out then your customer will not receive the automated email.

This feature can also be nifty for scheduling invoices. If an invoice is dated in the future then it will not be sent until the issue date.

Also please keep in mind that the system will send out an individual email for each outstanding invoice. If your customer has multiple, newly issued invoices at the same time then they would receive an email for each invoice.

The default behavior for sending invoices, credit notes, receipts, and statements will attach a PDF of the invoice, in addition to including a View Invoice button (using invoices as an example).

If you wish to change this behavior, you may do so by following these instructions:

You can configure your invoice email templates to include supporting file attachments in the email sent from Invoiced. This setting is off by default. When enabled all files attached to the invoice will be attached when that invoice is sent to the customer. The customer will always be able to access their file attachments in the customer portal regardless of this setting.

You can enable secondary file attachments by following these instructions: