Setting up recurring invoices

A recurring invoice generates invoices for you on a schedule — monthly retainers, hosting fees, anything you bill on repeat. You build it once, activate it, and each invoice is created automatically on the schedule you set.

Worth knowing: a recurring invoice is not itself an invoice. It is more like an invoice template, from which Sliptree generates invoices on a schedule and sends them out if you choose.

Recurring invoices live under Invoices → Recurring invoices.

Create a recurring invoice

1. Go to Invoices → Recurring invoices and click New Recurring Invoice.
2. Pick a customer and add line items, exactly as you would on a normal invoice.
3. Open Details & schedule and give it a Name — an internal label for yourself, like Acme monthly retainer. Your customer never sees it.
4. Set the schedule and the invoice details (both below).
5. Open Delivery and choose what happens to each invoice after it is generated.
6. Click Save, then Activate.

Until you activate it, no invoice is generated. At first the recurring invoice is Inactive, and you can keep editing it for as long as you like.

An existing invoice can be made recurring too: find it in the invoice list, open its actions menu and choose Make recurring. That copies the customer, line items, currency, language and title into a new recurring invoice. The original invoice is not linked to it and does not change.

Set the schedule

On the Schedule tab of Details & schedule:

• Repeat every — a number and a unit, for example 1 month or 2 weeks.
• Start date — the date of the first invoice. Every later run is counted from here.
• Expires — never, on a date, or after a number of invoices.
• Timezone — the zone the run dates follow. Invoices are generated around 8:00 in the morning on each run date.

A summary sentence under the fields tells you what you have built, plus the date of the next invoice.

For monthly schedules there is also Always generate on the last day of the month, which keeps a schedule at month-end regardless of how long the month is.

For example, with a start date of 28 February 2026 the next invoices are generated on 28 March and 28 April. With Always generate on the last day of the month turned on, they fall on 31 March and 30 April.

Set the invoice details

The Invoice details tab covers what each generated invoice looks like:

• Due date — payment terms. Each generated invoice is due this many days after its own issue date, so there is no fixed due date on the recurring invoice itself.
• Invoice title — the heading printed on every invoice from this schedule.
• Currency and Language.
• Payment method and Round the total to:. Both are copied to every generated invoice. See Rounding the total of an invoice or estimate.

Line items, notes, taxes and appearance work exactly as they do on a normal invoice — see Customising invoices and estimates.

Using placeholders on the invoice

The invoice most likely needs to name the period it is billing for. A rent invoice has to say the month and the year — August 2026 — and rather than typing that out again on every invoice, you use a placeholder.

Type : (a colon) in a line item description or in the notes, and a list of the placeholders opens with the value each one takes on the next invoice beside it — Month next to April, say. Pick one with the arrow keys and Enter, or click it, and it drops into your text as a clearly marked chip carrying the placeholder's name, Month. Hover a placeholder later and you get what it stands for, along with the value it will take on the next invoice.

Click a placeholder to select it, and the small formatting toolbar gains three buttons at its left: one shifts the placeholder a period back, one shifts it forward, and one removes it. The keyboard does the same, if you prefer: Cmd or Ctrl with the left or right arrow key shifts the selected chip, and Backspace removes it.

You can also type or paste a placeholder into the text yourself:

If you type a placeholder name yourself, Sliptree recognises it and turns it into a clearly marked chip.

The billing period is the calendar week, month or year the invoice date falls in. It stretches to cover the whole Repeat every setting, so a schedule that repeats every 3 months gets a three-month period.

Add +1 or -1 to move along: :month-1 is the previous month, and :period_start-1 is the start of the previous period. That is the usual choice when you bill for the period that has just ended. An invoice on the 1st of each month for last month's work would read:

Hosting and support, :period_start-1 – :period_end-1

To see the invoice as your customer will get it, turn on Preview next invoice on the recurring invoice's page. Every placeholder is replaced by the value it will take on the next run date. Generate now issues the invoice with today's date, so its placeholders are filled in from today.

Choose what happens after generation

On the Delivery panel, After an invoice is generated offers four options:

The email options add an Email template picker and a Recipient field with Cc and Bcc. Leave Recipient empty and invoices go to the customer's own email address. See Personalising recurring invoice emails.

Email delivery needs somewhere to send to — either a Recipient here or an email address on the customer. E-invoice delivery needs e-invoicing enabled for your business and a customer who accepts e-invoices. If a requirement is missing, activation is refused and the reason is shown.

Generating a one-off invoice

Open the recurring invoice and choose Generate now from the actions menu to create an invoice immediately — useful when a customer asks for the next period early. The screen asks you what should happen to that invoice once it is generated.

The invoice is issued with the current date, and the next scheduled invoice still comes on its usual date, because Generate now does not affect the schedule. It does count toward the number of invoices the schedule has produced, so on a schedule set to expire after a number of invoices it brings the end closer, and can finish the schedule outright.

To see what the next invoice will look like without creating anything, read the preview on the recurring invoice's own page, with Preview next invoice turned on so the placeholders show their values.

Where generated invoices go

Generated invoices are ordinary invoices. They take their numbers from your normal invoice sequence and are in the invoice list with all the other invoices. The Recurring invoice filter there narrows the list to the invoices generated from one recurring invoice.

Invoices generated from a recurring invoice get a small mark next to the number in the list that tells them apart. It shows which recurring invoice they came from, and clicking it takes you back to that recurring invoice. See Filtering and customising list views.

The recurring invoice's own page lists all previously generated invoices.

Change or delete a recurring invoice

Editing a recurring invoice — including its schedule — affects future invoices only. Invoices already generated are untouched.

Deleting one removes the schedule but keeps every invoice it has generated. Those invoices no longer carry a reference to the recurring invoice.