Recurring Documents

A recurring profile is a template plus a schedule. Once you have one, the system raises the next invoice, bill or expense for you on the day it is due, using the document you built it from.

Recurring profiles live as a Recurring tab on the document they belong to:

• Sales → Invoices → Recurring
• Purchases → Bills → Recurring
• Purchases → Expenses → Recurring

Create a recurring profile

You start from a document you have already made, so the customer, items, rates and taxes are all carried over.

1. Open the invoice, bill or expense you want to repeat.
2. Click Make recurring.
3. Give the profile a name. This is what you will see in the list, so make it recognisable, for example "Acme monthly retainer".
4. Set the schedule:
   • Repeat: daily, weekly, monthly or yearly.
   • Every: the interval, so every 2 months is Repeat monthly, Every 2.
   • On day: for monthly and yearly, the day of the month. Shorter months are clamped, so the 31st becomes the 28th in February.
   • Always the last day of the month: use this instead of a day number when you want month-end.
5. Set Start date, and either leave Never expires ticked or give it an end date or a number of occurrences.
6. Choose what each occurrence should do:

   Option	What happens
   Create as draft	The document is raised as a draft for you to review
   Create and post	The document posts immediately, moving stock and balances
   Create, post and email	As above, and the customer is emailed automatically (invoices only)

7. Click Create profile.

Managing profiles

From the Recurring tab you can see each profile's frequency, next run date, how many documents it has generated, and its status.

The actions menu on each row offers:

• Run now: generate the next occurrence immediately, without waiting for its date.
• Skip next: skip the upcoming occurrence only. The schedule continues afterwards.
• Pause / Resume: stop generating without deleting the profile.
• Delete: remove the profile. Documents it has already generated are kept.

How generation works

A few behaviours are worth knowing, because they are what stop a recurring profile from surprising you.

Nothing is backfilled. If a profile has been paused or the system was unavailable, only the latest due occurrence is generated. Missed dates are recorded against the profile rather than raised as a pile of back-dated documents.

The next date comes from the schedule, not the last document. A profile set for the 1st stays on the 1st even if an occurrence was run late or run early with Run now.

Each occurrence is raised once. If a run is interrupted after creating a document but before recording it, the next run recognises the document already exists rather than creating a duplicate.

Resuming looks forward. When you resume a paused profile, the next run is scheduled from today. Periods missed while it was paused are not generated.

When something goes wrong

If an occurrence cannot be generated, for example because an item on the template was deleted, the profile records the failure and shows it on the list and the profile page. The rest of your profiles are unaffected, and the profile tries again on its next run.

The document template is checked when you save the profile, so most problems are caught then rather than at 6 AM on the day it was due.

Editing a profile

Open the profile and click Edit schedule. Changes affect future documents only. Anything already generated stays as it was.

To change the items or amounts rather than the schedule, open the profile and edit its template document.