Invoicing & Payments

Create professional invoices, send them by email with a PDF attachment, and get paid online through Stripe.

Creating an invoice

There are two ways to create an invoice:

From scratch

Go to Invoices → New Invoice and fill in the details:

Select a client (required). The client picker is searchable — start typing a name to filter the list. All clients show here, even ones you haven’t started a project with yet, so you can invoice a retainer or one-off work without having to create a project first.
Select a project (optional). This list is filtered to the projects belonging to the client you just picked; type to search within them.
Add line items, Each line item has a description, quantity, and unit price. The line total is calculated automatically.
Set the tax rate, Auto-populated from Settings → Invoice Settings, but you can override it per invoice. The same default tax rate also applies to invoices created from time entries and from milestones, so VAT is consistent across every path.
Set issue and due dates
Add notes, Optional notes that appear on the invoice (e.g., payment terms)

Kiaro remembers the last client you invoiced and pre-selects them the next time you open this form, so repeat billing for the same client is one click lighter.

Invoice numbers are generated automatically and are unique within your workspace.

From time entries

If you track time with hourly rates on your projects, you can generate invoices directly from your time data. Go to Invoices → From Time Entries (or Time → Create Invoice from Time):

Select a client
Optionally filter by date range
Review and select uninvoiced billable time entries
Click Create Invoice

Kiaro groups the selected entries by task, calculates line item amounts from hours multiplied by the project’s hourly rate, and creates a draft invoice. The time entries are marked as invoiced so they won’t be included in future invoices.

See Time Tracking for more details on setting up hourly rates and logging time.

Line items

Each invoice must have at least one line item. Line items include:

Description, What the charge is for
Quantity, Number of units (supports decimals for hourly billing)
Unit price, Price per unit in cents

The subtotal, tax, and total are calculated automatically from your line items and tax rate.

Tax

The tax rate defaults to whatever you set in Settings → Invoice Settings. You can change it on any individual invoice. Tax is calculated as a percentage of the subtotal.

Saving as draft

The save button at the bottom of the invoice form changes label based on the Status you’ve selected. Pick Draft and the button reads Save Draft (or Save as Draft on a new invoice); switch the status to Sent and it becomes Save & Mark Sent, and so on. The button always saves the current state, the label just makes it explicit what saving means under the chosen status. You can save and reopen a draft as many times as you like.

When you’re editing an existing invoice, a small Last saved X ago indicator appears next to the Save button so you can see at a glance how recent the saved copy is.

Currency

Each invoice captures its currency at creation time. Kiaro picks the currency in this order:

The client’s billing currency if one is set on the client record
Otherwise the workspace default from Settings → Invoice Settings

Once an invoice is created, its currency is locked. Changing the client’s or workspace’s currency later does not retroactively affect existing invoices.

Supported currencies: USD, EUR, GBP, ZAR.

PDF generation and preview

Every invoice can be previewed and downloaded as a PDF. The PDF includes:

Your business details from invoice settings (logo, address, VAT ID)
The client’s Bill To block with their full billing address
Line items and totals in the invoice’s locked currency

If the “Bill To” block is missing the client’s address, update the client record at Clients → (the client) → Edit.

Sending invoices

Click Send on any invoice to email it to the client. The email includes:

A professional HTML email with the invoice summary
The invoice PDF as an attachment
A payment link (if you have Stripe Connect configured)

Sending an invoice automatically sets its status to Sent and sets the issue date to today if not already set.

Resending invoices

After an invoice has been sent, a Resend Invoice button appears on the invoice detail page. Use this when a client didn’t receive the original email or needs it sent again. Resending re-emails the full invoice with the PDF attachment and payment link.

Schedule send

Don’t want to send now? On draft invoices, click Schedule Send to pick a future date and time. The invoice is sent automatically at the scheduled time. You’ll see the scheduled date on the invoice detail page.

How emails look to your client

Invoice emails are personalized to look like they come from you, not from Kiaro:

Sender name: “Your Name via Kiaro”, your client sees your name first
Reply-to: Your email address, when the client replies, it goes to your inbox
Greeting: Uses the primary contact’s first name (e.g., “Hi Sarah,”) instead of the company name
Footer: “Sent on behalf of [Your Business Name]“

Copy Payment Link

On sent or overdue invoices, click Copy Payment Link to copy the Stripe payment URL to your clipboard. Use this if you prefer to send invoices from your own email, paste the link into your message so clients can still pay online.

Invoice statuses

Draft, Being prepared, not yet sent. Only draft invoices can be deleted.
Sent, Delivered to the client by email
Paid, Payment received (updated automatically via Stripe or manually)
Overdue, Past the due date without payment

Payment reminders

Kiaro handles payment reminders automatically, or you can send them manually, your choice.

Automatic reminders

When enabled (the default), Kiaro sends reminders on a configurable schedule:

Before due date, A “heads up” reminder X days before the invoice is due (default: 3 days). This prevents overdue situations by reminding clients before the deadline.
After due date, A gentle overdue reminder X days after the due date (default: 1 day).
Repeat reminders, If still unpaid, follow-up reminders every X days (default: 7 days), up to a maximum count (default: 3 reminders per invoice).

All of these are configurable in Settings → Invoice Settings → Email Preferences. Set any “days before” to 0 to disable pre-due-date reminders.

Manual reminders

On any sent or overdue invoice, click Send Reminder to send a reminder immediately. You can add a personal note that appears in the email, great for adding context like “Just checking if this came through OK?” The note appears in a highlighted block above the invoice details.

Email copies

Enable “Send me a copy of every email” in Settings to receive a BCC of every invoice and reminder email. You always know exactly what your client received, in your own inbox.

Controlling reminders

Go to Settings → Invoice Settings → Email Preferences to:

Toggle automatic reminders on or off globally
Configure the schedule, days before, days after, repeat interval, max reminders
Enable BCC copies, receive copies of all client-facing emails
Customize email text, write your own subject lines and body text for invoice and reminder emails

Email history

Every email Kiaro sends on your behalf is logged and visible on the invoice detail page timeline, so you always know what was sent and when.

Online payment via Stripe

If you’ve connected a Stripe account (see Stripe Connect), sent invoices include a payment link. Clients can pay directly from the email or from the Client Portal. When payment completes, the invoice status updates to Paid automatically.

You can also manually mark an invoice as paid for offline payments.

CSV export

Export your invoice data as a CSV file from the invoices list page.