From Accepted Quote to Approved Invoice, Step by Step

The quote is signed. The client typed their name on the accept page yesterday. Now you need an invoice that matches it line for line, gets a PO number attached, lands in the right AP inbox, and comes back approved. Here is how that actually happens, step by step, without you retyping a single rate.

Step 1: Confirm the quote is actually accepted and locked

Before you generate anything, open the quote and check its state. You are looking for two things: a signature (the recipient typed their name) and a timestamp that falls before the valid-until date. If the quote expired and they accepted it late, that is fine, but note it. You may want to reissue with a fresh valid-until date so there is no argument later about which version of scope was agreed.

If you are new to the quote side of the product, the short version is on the quotes feature page: you send a quote with a valid-until date, the customer accepts by typing their name, and you are ready to invoice. The accept event is the green light for everything below.

Step 2: Generate the invoice from the accepted quote

Do not start a blank invoice. Convert the accepted quote directly. Line items, descriptions, quantities, unit prices, discounts, currency, and tax treatment all carry over. The invoice picks up your next number in sequence, which matters if you have set a format like 2024-0042 and want it to keep incrementing cleanly. Our take on that is in the guide to invoice numbering best practices.

What you fill in at this point is short: issue date (today), payment terms (Net 15, Net 30, whatever the quote specified), due date (calculated from terms), and any project reference the client asked for during the quote stage. If the quote was in EUR and the client now wants to be billed in USD, that is a content change. Make it now, before you send, not after.

Step 3: Send the link and let the recipient fill in their own details

You share a private link. The recipient opens it without signing up for anything. This is the part that saves you the email loop. They can edit four things directly on their side: the PO number, their billing entity (the legal name on their AP records, which is often not the trading name on the quote), their billing address, and the AP contact. You get notified on each edit and can revert if something looks wrong.

This is also where the invoice gets forwarded. The person who hired you is rarely the person who pays you. They click forward, the AP team gets the link, and AP can keep editing the same fields. If you have ever had a client say "can you resend it to ap@", you already know why this matters. A longer take on that handoff is in how to forward an invoice to accounts payable.

Step 4: Handle change requests without breaking the audit trail

Sometimes AP comes back and says the rate on line 3 was supposed to be 1,800 not 2,000, or that they need the currency switched, or that Net 30 should have been Net 45. These are not fields the recipient can edit directly. They submit a change request. You see it, you approve or decline. If you approve, a new version (V2) is created. The previous version stays in history.

PO numbers and billing address edits do not bump the version. Those are amendments to the current version. The practical difference matters when AP asks which version they approved. If you want the full breakdown, see versions vs amendments. The short rule: money or scope changes the version, identification details amend it.

Step 5: Get the approval and let the invoice lock

Once AP is satisfied, they click approve. That version locks permanently. You cannot edit it. They cannot edit it. If something needs to change after approval, you issue a credit note or a new invoice. This is the boundary the audit trail depends on, so treat it as final.

At approval, download the PDF for your records and your accountant. The recipient already has the link, but a PDF is what gets attached to their payment run and to your books. If your bookkeeper prefers everything in one place, the accountant view covers how that handoff works.

What to do when the quote and the invoice need to diverge

Sometimes the scope shifts between accept and invoice. A photographer adds a second shoot day. A developer cuts a feature. Do not silently change the line items on the invoice and hope no one notices. Either issue a revised quote first and have the client re-accept, or generate the invoice from the original quote and then submit the scope change as a tracked edit so V2 carries an obvious reason. The client's AP team will check. Skipping this step is one of the most common reasons invoices stall after approval, which we cover in why Net 30 invoices pay late.

Doing this at volume

If you send a handful of quotes a month, the manual flow above is fine. If you are running an agency that issues fifty quotes a month and converts most of them, automate the convert step. The REST API and MCP server let you trigger invoice creation from an accepted quote event, pass through the PO if one was supplied at quote stage, and route the link to the right AP address you already have on file. The human approval step stays human. Everything around it stops being typing.

One more thing worth doing once: set your quote template and your invoice template to share the same line item format, the same tax labels, and the same currency code from ISO 4217. When the two documents look identical except for the word at the top, AP processes them faster. That is the whole goal.