Creating and Editing Invoices

This article covers invoice creation, editing, and how Haiku.lt helps with these tasks.

Creating Invoices

When creating an invoice, you need to provide the following information:

• Series name - The series name is typically a few letters, such as your initials or an abbreviation of your business name. It’s important to keep the series name consistent for all invoices related to the same business activity.

• Series number - Series numbers should be sequential, and Haiku.lt will automatically generate the next available series number based on the series name. Haiku.lt prevents you from creating invoices with duplicate series numbers.

• Invoice date - The date when the invoice was created. Note that series numbers must be sequential not only by number but also by date (e.g., invoice #5 cannot be dated earlier than invoice #4). Haiku.lt prevents you from creating invoices with incorrect dates.

• Language - Currently Haiku.lt supports Lithuanian and English. This setting determines the language of the generated invoice PDF.

• Seller - Your business details. This may include:

  • Business or individual name

  • Tax identification number or business registration number

  • Address

  • Email address

  • Phone number

  • Bank account number

  Haiku.lt will save this information to your settings and automatically populate it when creating future invoices.

• Buyer - Information about the buyer. For individual consumers who don’t need the invoice for business purposes, you may not need to include full business details. However, to take advantage of Haiku.lt’s features, we recommend including at least a name and email address or other unique buyer information. This allows you to quickly find invoices for specific buyers and speeds up creating new invoices for repeat customers.

• Issued by - The person who created the invoice.

• Additional information - Here you can specify additional details you want to display on the invoice, such as payment terms.

• Notes - Information for your internal use that will help you find invoices later. This information is not included in the invoice PDF.

• Line items - Finally, you need to add the services or products.

Once you’ve entered this information, you can create the invoice and a PDF file will be generated that you can send to the buyer.

Editing Invoices

With a created invoice, you can perform these actions:

• Edit and save changes - If you’ve already sent the invoice to the buyer, it’s better not to modify it.

• Mark as paid - This information is for your convenience to quickly track whether all issued invoices have been paid. The system will calculate how many invoices are paid.

• Lock the invoice - If you’ve sent the invoice to the buyer, you can lock it to prevent further changes or deletion.

• Delete - Generally, you should not delete invoices, especially if you’ve sent them to the buyer. If you do delete one, you must ensure that the series number is still used.

Proforma Invoices

It’s important to know that proforma invoices are not accounting documents in most jurisdictions. For this reason, Haiku.lt does not allow using the same series name for proforma invoices as for regular invoices. Haiku.lt also excludes proforma invoices from various calculations.

Proforma invoices can be useful in situations where you want to receive payment or a partial payment, but aren’t yet certain about the final invoice. For example:

• You want to receive an advance payment before starting work.

• You’re not sure if you’ll receive full payment, but want to inform the customer about the expected invoice amount. In this case, the final invoice is typically issued after receiving payment for the proforma invoice.

Credit Invoices

Sometimes you may need to issue a refund because a product or service didn’t meet the customer’s expectations. In this situation, you obviously cannot delete the original invoice (especially if you only need to refund part of the invoice amount). In such cases, you can issue a credit invoice.