The Invoicing tab on a client record brings that client's billing into one place: a full history of their invoices, and their own invoice settings.

It's built for the question you get asked on the phone. What have we actually invoiced this client, and did it go through?

Open a client from your Clients list and go to the Invoicing tab on their record. You'll find two sub-tabs, Invoices for the history and Settings for that client's invoice settings.

The history covers the client's whole relationship with you rather than just the current period. Each row shows the date, reference, net, VAT and total, the fee type such as Recurring or On completion, and the status.

A note at the top reminds you the history is read-only, with a link through to Billing Overview where recurring invoices are approved and edited. More on that at the end.

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Search by reference, amount or description, and narrow the table with the Type, Status and Period filters. Filtering to Failed is a quick way to see whether anything needs picking up on that client.

Click any row to open it. You'll see the client, the reference, the invoice date and due date, and the status with the date and time it reached that status, so a failed invoice tells you exactly when it failed.

Underneath, each line is listed with its description, its account code, and its total, followed by the total excluding tax. That's the quickest way to answer a client asking what a particular fee was made up of.

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Use Export CSV to pull the client's invoice history out as a spreadsheet, handy for your own records, for a client querying their fees, or for passing to a colleague.

Sometimes an invoice can't be posted, usually because of something that needs fixing at your accounting provider's end. Socket records exactly why, so you can put it right and send it again rather than guessing.

You'll come across a failure in one of two places: here in the invoice history, or at the moment you complete a job or post an invoice, where Socket tells you what went wrong there and then. Either way it's recorded against the client, so nothing is lost if you miss the message on screen. That's true of every kind of invoice, recurring, the activation invoice raised when a proposal is won, and on-completion invoices.

These two look similar and need opposite actions, so it's worth knowing which is which. Hover over either chip for a reminder.

Failed means the invoice never reached your accounting system. Nothing exists at their end, so it needs raising again once you've fixed the cause.

Email failed means the other way round: the invoice was raised successfully and only the email to your client didn't send. The money side is done and the invoice is sitting in your accounting system, your client just hasn't been told about it. To get it to them, resend it from your accounting system.

Open the invoice and you'll see why it was rejected, taken from your provider's own response, along with when it happened. That tells you what to fix before you try again.

The billing contact has been archived. Far and away the most common one. If the client's contact has been archived in your accounting provider, it will reject new invoices for them. Un-archive the contact there, then re-post in Socket. If it happened as you completed a job, un-archive the contact and complete the job again.

You'll usually see this one coming. A banner appears on this tab when the client's billing contact is archived, with a link to sort it out, which is worth acting on before your next billing run rather than after.

A connection or organisation problem. If Socket is connected to the wrong organisation, or the connection needs re-authorising, invoices can be rejected. Check it under Settings then Integrations. Our Xero guide covers reconnecting.

A VAT or tax code problem. VAT on posted invoices comes from the tax codes and contact settings in your provider rather than from Socket, so that's where it's adjusted.

Once the cause is fixed, use the Re-post option on the invoice's row, so you can deal with it on the client's own record rather than hunting for it elsewhere.

Socket asks you to confirm first, naming the client, the amount and the provider, since it's raising a real invoice against a real client. Worth a read before you click through. If the fix worked, the invoice posts and the status updates.

If an invoice fails when you complete an on-completion job, the job still completes. It's marked done and the invoice is recorded as failed for you to re-post once you've sorted the cause, so a problem at your provider can't leave your work management out of step with what you've actually delivered.

See Managing On Completion Work in Socket for the full completion and billing flow.

The Settings sub-tab holds this client's own invoice settings, so you can control how this particular client is invoiced. At the top you'll see their connections, the accounting system and payment provider linked to them, above the settings themselves.

For a full walkthrough of what each setting does, see Configuring your Billing settings.

Everything here is for looking at. Recurring invoices are approved and edited in Billing Overview, and changes to a client's billing plan are made there too.

That's deliberate. Your billing run stays in one place, so nothing gets approved twice by two people looking at two different screens. Re-posting a failed invoice is the one action you can take from here, because that's about fixing something rather than approving it.