Create and send your first invoice

If you do any work on the side, you need a way to bill for it that doesn’t look like it came out of a word processor in 1998. GlidePath’s invoice creator lives in Business → Invoices. You fill in a client and a few line items, and you get a tidy PDF to send. It’s part of the app you already bought — no separate account, no uploading your client list to someone’s cloud; it all stays on your computer.

We’ll build one example the whole way through: a fictional studio, Acme Web Studio, billing a client called Beta Corp for a month of design work.

One-time setup: your business details

Open Business → Invoices and scroll to Your business details. This is what appears at the top of every invoice, so you only fill it in once:

Business name and your details (address, email, phone) — whatever you want a client to see.
Logo — PNG, JPG, WEBP or GIF, under 2 MB. It shows up at the top of every invoice and in the PDF.
Currency symbol — defaults to $, three characters max. It drives every amount on screen, in the live totals, and in the PDF.
Brand color — pick the color used for the “INVOICE” heading. Match it to your logo and the whole thing suddenly looks like yours.
Payment instructions / default terms — e.g. “Payment due within 14 days. Zelle to [email protected].” This prints at the bottom of every invoice.
Invoice # prefix (optional) — type INV- and your invoices number as INV-1001, INV-1002, and so on.
Page size — Letter for the US, A4 most other places.

Hit Save details. You won’t have to touch this again unless something changes.

Create the invoice

Now scroll up to Create an invoice:

Client name and bill-to details — who’s paying. For our example: Beta Corp, with their address and email.
Issue date is set to today; add a due date if you want one (it also drives the “Overdue” flag later).
Line items — one row per thing you’re charging for. Type a description, a quantity, and a rate, and the amount fills in automatically. For Acme: “Website design — May,” qty 10, rate $125 → $1,250.00. Click Add another line for more.
Tax — if you charge it, give it a label (“Sales Tax”, “GST/HST”, whatever fits) and a percentage. Acme adds 8.25%.

As you type, the running total updates live at the bottom. The three numbers are right, but the labels in the create form are generic — Subtotal / Tax / Total. Your typed tax label and percentage (“Sales Tax (8.25%)”) appear once the invoice is saved, on the sheet and in the PDF:

Subtotal $1,250.00 · Tax $103.13 · Total $1,353.13

Click Create invoice.

Preview, then download the PDF

You land on a preview of the finished invoice — the exact “sheet” your client will get: your logo and details up top, the bill-to, the line items, the totals, and your payment note at the bottom. On a fresh invoice the on-screen preview matches the PDF, so there are no surprises.

(That stops being exactly true once payments are recorded: the screen then adds Paid / Credits / Balance rows for your own tracking. The PDF keeps printing just Subtotal, Tax if you charge it, and Total — which is what the client should see anyway.)

When it looks right, click Download PDF. You get a clean file named something like Invoice-1001.pdf — no browser headers, no “localhost” in the margin, just a professional invoice you can email straight to the client.

Track it: Sent → Paid

Back on the invoices list, each invoice has a status:

Draft — still working on it.
Sent — you’ve emailed it. Click Mark sent.
Partial — they paid some of it. Record what arrived with Record payment (Amount, Received date, and an optional Note) and the invoice moves here on its own: it stays in your outstanding total for the remaining balance rather than flipping to paid or staying stuck at sent. This is the status people are surprised to need, and it’s the honest one for a deposit-then-balance arrangement.
Paid — money’s in. Click Mark paid and it moves out of your outstanding total.

Use Record payment rather than Mark paid whenever the money arrived on a different day than today. It’s the only place you can set the real Received date, and that date is what the deposit matcher searches around later. Mark paid stamps today, which quietly breaks the match for anything that landed weeks ago.

Overdue isn’t a status you set — it’s derived, and only for invoices you’ve actually billed. An invoice goes overdue once its due date passes while it’s Sent or Partial, so a part-paid invoice doesn’t stop chasing the rest. A Draft never goes overdue (you haven’t billed it), and an invoice with no due date stays in the Current aging bucket until you give it one.

The summary at the top carries five cards: Outstanding, Overdue, Deposit match, Collected (payments recorded across saved invoices — this is the money-in number), and Recurring.

Need a similar invoice next month? Open one and click Clone — it drops you into the edit form on a fresh draft, with the issue date reset to today and the due date shifted by the same number of days.

If it’s genuinely every month, don’t clone. On an open invoice, Use this invoice as a recurring template sets a cadence (Weekly / Monthly / Quarterly / Yearly, plus “Due after N days”) and click Save recurring template. When the issue date comes round it drafts the next invoice for you. Nothing is sent automatically — you still review and send — but you stop re-cloning the same job.

After they pay: record it as business income

Marking an invoice Paid unlocks one more thing: you can file that payment on your Schedule C — the IRS form a sole proprietor uses to report business income. Open the paid invoice (View) and scroll to the bottom of the page — this panel is the last block, below Payments, Credit notes, Repeat work and Supporting files. (Directly under the sheet is Payments, not this.)

The first time, click Set up income tracking. GlidePath adds a “Business Income” category and points it at Schedule C line 1 — gross receipts, the line for money you earned. That’s a one-time, one-click step; you won’t see it again after that.

From then on, GlidePath looks for the bank deposit that paid this invoice and offers it to you. Pick the right one and click Record as business income. The deposit is filed under gross receipts and shows up on your Schedule C report at tax time.

The matching is narrow on purpose, and knowing the three rules saves you the “why is nothing showing up” hunt:

It matches the cash you recorded, to the exact cent — the payment amount on the invoice, not the invoice total. So if you issued a credit note, or the deposit landed net of a processing fee, the numbers won’t line up and nothing gets offered.
It only looks at accounts typed Business. A deposit sitting in an account typed Liquid is invisible to it. If nothing appears, check the account’s Type on /Accounts before assuming the payment hasn’t landed.
It searches ±21 days around the paid date — and Mark paid stamps that date as today. So if the money actually arrived a month ago, marking it paid today puts the window three weeks away from the deposit and it will never match. Use the Record payment form instead and set Received to the date the money really arrived.

A few more things worth knowing:

It’s always your call. GlidePath surfaces the candidate; nothing is recorded until you confirm. If more than one matches, you choose.
It follows the real money. Income is tied to the actual deposit, not the invoice — so what lands on your Schedule C is what hit the bank.
No deposit yet? If the payment genuinely hasn’t landed or hasn’t been imported, the panel says so, and it’ll appear once the deposit shows up. It counts either way if you categorize that deposit as business income yourself.
Recorded once stays once. After you record it, the invoice shows a ✓ and the same deposit is never counted twice.

Where it lives

Every invoice is saved in your local GlidePath files, right alongside the rest of your planning data. The invoice tool does not upload the invoice or client list; if you export or email the PDF, that copy follows the place you send it. Back up the file like any other business record.

That’s the whole loop: set your details once, then it’s about a minute per invoice from “I did the work” to “here’s a clean PDF.” When tax season comes, the same business numbers feed into your Schedule C.