How billing works
From the services you record to charges, invoices, tax, and payments — the money side, explained.
Billing in decavet follows a clear path from the work you did to the money you collect. Understanding the path makes every billing screen obvious.
The path
Services rendered ──► Charges ──► Invoice ◄──applied── Payment
│
tax + discounts
1. Services rendered
Everything billable starts as a service rendered on a visit — an exam, a vaccine, a medication, a procedure. Each has a quantity and a price (usually filled in from your catalog).
2. Charges
When a visit's work is ready to bill, decavet collects the billable lines into charges. Think of charges as a staging area: here you can review the lines, apply discounts, add a travel fee, and decide who pays before anything becomes a formal document. Charges stay editable.
3. Invoice
You turn charges into an invoice — the document the client receives. Creating the invoice freezes its lines as a snapshot, applies tax to the taxable items, applies any discount, and calculates the total. You can also add adjustments (a fee, surcharge, late fee, courtesy discount, or write-off).
Note: An invoice's paid state — Draft, Sent, Partial, Paid, Overdue — reflects the payments applied to it. decavet keeps that up to date for you; you don't set "paid" by hand.
4. Payment
A payment is money received — cash, card, check, e-transfer, or online. A payment is applied to one or more invoices, which lowers their balances. Payments are independent of invoices: you can take a deposit or prepayment before any invoice exists, and apply it later.
Estimates
An estimate is the same kind of document as an invoice, used to quote a client before the work. Estimates can be accepted, declined, or expired, and can become an invoice once the work is done. See Estimates.
Tax
Tax is set up once (Settings → Tax rates) and then applies automatically to taxable items when you create an invoice. The tax amount is snapshotted on the invoice at creation, so a later rate change never rewrites old invoices. A client can be marked tax-exempt on their contact. See Taxes.
Splitting a bill
When one trip serves animals with different owners — or one horse is owned by a syndicate — decavet can split the work into a separate invoice per owner, or by ownership percentage. See Split billing.
A note on money
decavet stores all money precisely and shows it in your currency. Discounts can be a flat amount or a percentage, and the app keeps the running total correct as you edit.