Advance Invoice

The advance invoice is a percentage of the approved estimate/bid that is due before the start of production.

Gabrielle P avatar
Written by Gabrielle P
Updated over a week ago

The advance invoice is simply a percentage of the approved estimate/bid that is due before the start of production. You can create multiple advance invoices inside BlinkBid at any point in the process. Have a look at our quick video tutorial for a demonstration on how to create an advance invoice and also check out the picture guide below.

  1. Go to the hamburger menu in the estimate window and select “Advance Invoice”:

2a. You have the option to enter an Advance Nickname, which does not show up on the Advance document, but will help you internally to distinguish the advances.

b. You can also enter an Advance Invoice number, which supports numerals or text, and appears under the Advance Invoice title as well as an Advance Invoice date.  

c. Choose whether to append Bank Wire info or Terms and Conditions, which will be pulled from your Settings. And check the boxes for tax, billing and logo accordingly.

d. Enter the advance amount as numbers only (the Advance Value Amount box will not accept symbols such as a $ , . etc).

Do not click “Done.” Instead, choose and click on one of the three orange buttons as the appropriate advance amount.

f. Once you have clicked on one orange button, a clickable link will appear that gives you the option to choose to generate an Itemized or a Summary version of the Advanced invoice or to delete it. You can generate up to six Advance Invoices.

g. Once you click on a version, you will be automatically redirected to another screen that contains your advance invoice document. You can then print or save a PDF to email.

Under Settings < Document Appearance < Layout Options, you can choose whether to show an expanded or abbreviated version of the Advance Invoice Numbers Block. The expanded version will show the subtotal breakdown: the total with markups and taxes called out in the number stack.

Advance Invoice Paid

When you move from the Estimate to Invoice stage or the Production to Invoice stage, the advance invoice will appear as a pending payment. Once you "Mark as Received" the advance payment will be called out separately as a paid line item in the payments received section of the final invoice.

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