Invoices mirror quotes
Why the invoice a client receives looks like the quote they approved — same sections, same brand, same wording — and what an invoice deliberately leaves out.
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A homeowner who approved a quote should recognise the invoice as its twin. In FieldQuo that is not a styling choice made twice; the quote and the invoice are rendered from the same shared sections, with the same colour maths and the same trade wording, so the two cannot drift apart.
Overview
Every client-facing document — the quote PDF, the invoice PDF, the covering emails and the portal copies — is assembled from one library of sections: header, client details, line items grouped by scope, totals, payment summary, payment terms, how the work runs, notes, signature block and footer. Each section knows how to draw itself as PDF and as email, so an invoice's totals block is the quote's totals block with a different number in it.
The colours come from your one brand colour, measured for contrast rather than guessed — see Set up your branding. The money comes from the invoice itself; the trade content — what is included, what could change the price, the process — comes from the quote it was built from.
What carries over from the quote
- The scope, by trade — one card per service, labelled the way the quote grouped it (“Kitchen: cabinet install”), with any add-ons the client ticked as their own lines.
- What this invoice says — the “what's included” and “what could change the price” sentences the client already read on the quote, resolved from the same trade content.
- How the work runs — the process steps with their timelines, and the process notes, marked as either written on the quote or your company default.
- Payment terms — your company's terms from Company Settings, shown as milestones when they parse as a schedule and verbatim when they do not.
- Photos, the client's language, and the tax decision — an invoice from a quote raised without tax is an invoice without tax.
The money is copied, not linked. Editing the quote after approval changes nothing on the invoice, and editing the invoice changes nothing on the quote. Each document keeps saying what it said when the client read it.
What an invoice deliberately leaves out
The default invoice PDF is header, client details, line items, totals, Payment History, notes and footer. Three sections a quote carries are dropped on purpose: no process steps (the work is done), no signature block (there is nothing left to accept), and no payment schedule (the schedule already happened — what is owed now is the balance).
In their place the invoice leads with the balance, not the total. On an invoice with a deposit already paid, the email and the portal headline what is still owed and list the payments received underneath, because a total the client has partly settled reads like being billed twice.
What you see on the invoice page
Open any invoice and the framed article in the middle is the client's document, in your colour: letterhead, Invoice and its number (with v2 once it has been amended), Prepared for, the date, the due date, From quote with a link, the scope cards, What this invoice says, How the work runs, Terms explained, notes, photos, the totals band and Payment terms. Everything outside the frame — the banners, the buttons, the job, the cost panel — is yours and never reaches the client.
Settings → PDF Templates has two cards, Quote PDF and Invoice PDF, each with its layouts and the sections they carry. Reordering or removing a section there changes what the client receives; the on-screen mirror follows the same data. See The quote PDF.
Häufige Fragen
The client says the invoice does not match the quote. Where do I look?
Open the invoice and compare the scope cards with the quote's. The invoice carries the accepted total — the figure on the page the client pressed Approve on, add-ons included — so a difference is almost always an add-on they ticked or a change made on the quote after approval.
Can the invoice show a signature line?
No. The Signature block is a quote-only section — the template editor does not offer it on an Invoice PDF layout, because the approval already happened and there is nothing left to sign.
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