Quote and Invoice Lifecycle

An invoice is a sale transaction document indicating the products, quantities, and agreed prices for products or services the merchant had provided to the customer for payment, while a quote is an estimate provided to the customer before the provision of the services or products.

Businesses make heavy use of quotes and invoices and they should be aware of their lifecycles as well.

Quote Lifecycle

Quotes let you discuss pricing for a service with a customer.

Flowchart explaining the quote lifecycle as explained in the below steps

  1. Create a quote.
  2. Send a quote to a customer.
  3. The customer will receive the quote. He will be able to accept or decline the quote.
    • If the customer accepts, the quote will be converted to an invoice. If you have automatic scheduling enabled, the invoice will be delivered on the scheduled date.
    • If the customer declines, the quote status will be set to rejected. You can adjust or update the rejected quote.
    • If you set an expiration date for the quote and the customer doesn’t accept or reject the quote before the expiration date, the quote’s status will be set to rejected.

For hospitality, QUOTE is represented as TQUOTE and INVOICE is representated as TPASS.

Invoice Lifecycle

Depending on how an invoice was created and when the end user pays its balance, an invoice can take several paths.

Flowchart explaining the billing and invoicing lifecycle as explained in the below steps

In general, an invoice goes through the following steps:

  1. Create a quote either manually or by converting an accepted quote.
  2. Send the invoice to a customer.
  3. The customer will receive the invoice.
  4. The customer will be able to pay for the invoice at their convenience by clicking a link to a Hosted Invoice Page (HIP).

Flowchart explaining the hospitality invoice lifecycle as explained in the below steps

For hospitality, the invoices status will remain unpaid until the customer has paid.

  • If the customer submits valid payment information, the invoice’s status will be converted to authorized. While the status is set as authorized, merchant can add charges for other services on top of those from the original quote. When the authorization period is completed, the full total will be submitted for processing.