Clarification around due date behaviour in Recurring Invoices

Self-Hosted | v5
1

Please can I have some clarification around how “Due Dates” behave with Recurring Invoices. I have read the page on the user guide at Free Source Available Invoicing, Expenses & Time-Tracking | Invoice Ninja which states “Select the due date for the recurring invoice (calculated from the date it is issued).”

Below is my experience in practice

Experience 1
Our billing cycle starts on the 15th of each month and invoices are due in 15 days. When we initially deployed the system, I created a number of recurring invoices for the 2024/08/15 with the Due Date being “15 days” with the expectation that this would create a due date of the 30th of August, but the invoices were created with the due date of the 15th of September. My assumption was then that “Due Date” is the number of days in the following month that the invoice is due…so I have now set the Due Date to 1 for these recurring invoices, being the 1st day of next month (not sure if my understanding here is correct now based on my experience below)

Experience 2
Created a recurring invoice that processed today (23Aug) with a Due Date of 30 days and when the Recurring Invoice was processed, the Due Date on the invoice is 2024/08/30…so it set the due date as not 30 days from invoice date, but day 30 of the CURRENT month.

I’m hoping for some clarification on the behavior of the Due Date field in Recurring Invoices so I can set invoice due dates correctly.

Many thanks :slight_smile:

2

Hi,

  1. If the invoice is generated on the 15th of the month and the due date is set to the 15th day of the month the app will set the due date to next month.

  2. It sounds like you may want to set the due date on the recurring invoice to “Use payment terms” and then set the invoice payment terms for the client to Net 30.

3

@hillel As I understand what the user is inquiring about here:

Maybe I’m wrong, but I understand this to be invoiced on 15th of a month, with Net15? Which should be easy enough to setup.

Then, it looks like ‘experience 2’ is invoiced on 23rd with Net30.

So, I think they are likely confusing due date being a specific date (ex: 15th next month or 30th this month), whilst they actually are looking for the Net.

4

Yeah, so I think we are confusing Due Date with being X days after the date the invoice was generated. Where the actual behaviour is the day of the following month after an invoice was generated…I ran two additional tests.

Invoice generated on 23/08 with Day 15 set as Due date resulted in an invoice due on 15/9
Invoice generated on 23/08 with Day 1 set as Due date resulted in an invoice due on 1/9

5

Were you able to get your invoices set the way you wanted?

6

Yes, thank you. What I’ve come to realise is that the due date is always from the 1st of the next month and note from the date of the invoice like most other accounting systems :slight_smile:

Our invoices are generated on the 15th and the due date is the 1st of the next month, so we just set due date to Day 1 and all is good.