The quotation & invoice editor

Every project has an Accounting tab. Inside it, work is billed in cycles: one quotation, its order confirmation, and the invoices (and delivery notes) that follow from it. All of these documents share the same editor — learn it once, use it everywhere.

The document chain and its statuses

A cycle typically runs: quotation → order confirmation → invoice(s).

Each document moves through the same stations:

1. Draft — you're still working on it. Only drafts are editable: once a document leaves draft, its content, discounts and totals are locked.
2. Published — final and ready to send to the customer. This is the moment an invoice gets its number.
3. Quotations add Confirmed — the customer accepted (a confirmed quotation is what the projects dashboard shows as awaiting invoice), and docket creates the order confirmation from it.
4. Invoices add Paid — set it when the money arrives; overdue invoices are flagged automatically.

Quotations and invoices can also be canceled; canceling an invoice creates a cancellation invoice that reverses it. See The billing cycle at a glance for the whole flow as a diagram.

Project Managers and Admins create, edit and publish documents and mark invoices paid; deleting a document is Admin-only.

How a document is structured: phases, positions, services

The editor builds documents from three levels:

• Phases — the big blocks of a quotation ("Phase 1: Concept", "Phase 2: Implementation"). Each phase has its own title, description and subtotal. They're how agencies naturally think about a pitch — and the customer sees the same structure on the PDF.
• Positions — the deliverables inside a phase ("Design system", "CMS setup").
• Services — the price lines inside a position: a service from your price list, a quantity in days or hours, and the rate (pre-filled from the project's rate cascade, adjustable per line).

Two special block types sit alongside phases: Agency service and External service — for overarching agency fees and passed-through third-party costs.

This choice is permanent — decide it when you create the first phase. A document is either built from free-form phases (as many as you like, named however you want) or it uses only the two fixed blocks, Agency service and External service — not both, and not a mix. Whichever you create first locks in the model for that document; there's no switching to the other one later. The Agency service / External service model is meant for fast, small quotations where you don't need custom phase structure — reach for free-form phases for anything bigger.

Useful editor features:

• Optional positions: mark a position or price line as optional — it's shown to the customer but not included in the total. Great for upsells and alternatives.
• Discount / surcharge on the whole document.
• A free-text footer per document (terms, delivery notes).
• Every document has a language (German or English) — labels and the PDF follow it.
• Custom fields of the customer (e.g. a PO number) are filled in the sidebar and printed on the PDF — see Customers: contacts, addresses & custom fields.

The invoice editor shows quoted vs. billed quantities per line, so you always see how much of the quotation each invoice consumes.

Invoice numbers

docket numbers invoices the way accountants (and auditors) like it:

• A draft has no number — the PDF shows a placeholder and is marked as draft.
• The number is assigned at publish, sequentially and gap-free per workspace. Deleting drafts never burns a number.
• An optional prefix comes from your account settings and is date-based — e.g. a year prefix turns 20034 into 2026-20034.
• If your numbering must come from elsewhere (an existing ERP sequence), enable custom invoice numbers in the account settings: publishing then asks you to type the number, and docket only checks it's unused.

Company-wide document settings — letterhead, footers for quotes and invoices, bank details, VAT id, logo — live in the Admin area and are printed on every PDF.

Invoice types

When you create an invoice in a cycle, you pick its type. docket keeps the types consistent within one cycle (for example, advance payments and partial invoices don't mix):

Advance payment (Abschlagsrechnung)

Bill a deduction of the quotation total before or during the work — as a percentage or a fixed amount. Use it for "50% upon order" arrangements.

Partial invoice (Teilrechnung)

Bill specific positions of the quotation that are done, at their real value. The billed quantities are tracked, so the next partial invoice starts where the last one stopped.

Final invoice (Schlussrechnung)

Closes the cycle: it contains the full quotation — including positions that were added along the way — and lists all previous advance/partial invoices as deductions, so the customer sees exactly what remains to pay. After the final invoice, the cycle takes no further invoices.

Cancellation invoice (Stornorechnung)

Voids a published invoice the compliant way: it references the original invoice, mirrors its content, and gets its own number. The original is marked canceled — nothing is ever deleted or renumbered.

Where the money side connects

• A confirmed quotation feeds the project's budget and the revenue forecast.
• Every cycle's state is visible on the projects dashboard as a colored dot per cycle — from quote draft through invoice open/overdue to paid.
• External costs assigned to the quotation can be exported as a ready-to-send PDF bundle for the customer (see External costs).