Marking invoices paid

Marking an invoice paid is one of the most important actions you take in Coffer. It's how Coffer learns that the cash has actually arrived, which is when the GST and income tax ringfences move and your “Yours to spend” number adjusts. Pending invoices don't affect the ringfence at all. They appear under the “Plus … pending” line on the dashboard, so you can see what's expected without counting it as spendable yet.

How to mark an invoice paid

From the Invoices page, select the invoice from the list. Its details open on the right, where the header shows Mark paid. Coffer asks for one thing: the payment date (defaults to today, edit to match the actual date the money landed in your account). Save, and the invoice moves to Paid.

The payment date is what Coffer uses to:

• Show this invoice as paid in the activity feed on the relevant date
• Decide which GST or provisional tax period the payment belongs to when you log returns (e.g. a payment dated 12 September falls into the Aug-Sep GST period)
• Place the received income in the right month on the dashboard income chart

What changes on the dashboard

As soon as the invoice is marked paid, the dashboard math re-runs and the following all move at once:

• Ringfenced GST: goes up by the invoice's GST amount. For a $5,000 ex-GST invoice that's an extra $750 ringfenced.
• Ringfenced income tax: goes up by the invoice's ex-GST amount multiplied by your income tax rate. Coffer works that rate out by walking the NZ brackets on your projected income, and falls back to 33.7% until you've entered an expected income. On a $5,000 invoice at that fallback rate, that's $1,685 ringfenced.
• Yours to spend: drops by the sum of the two new ringfences. The headline number shrinks by the part of the payment that isn't yours, leaving the part that is.
• Paid total for the current period: goes up by the invoice total.
• Pending total: goes down by the same amount, because this invoice has moved out of the incoming pile.
• Activity feed: shows the paid invoice at the top, dated to the payment date you entered.

Your income-tax set-aside is locked in

The rate Coffer used to work out that income-tax set-aside is locked at the moment you mark the invoice paid, based on your projected income at that time. If your projected income changes later in the year, Coffer keeps this invoice's set-aside fixed and adjusts the rate on future invoices instead. Past paid invoices stay stable; any catch-up you owe rides forward on new income rather than retroactively re-valuing invoices you already ringfenced against.

On the Detailed tax breakdown page, each paid invoice's Rate column carries a small hint reminding you the number is fixed. If you unmark an invoice as paid and mark it paid again later, the rate re-locks at the new moment's projection.

Reading the Pay Summary

Open a paid invoice to see its Pay Summary. It opens by default for paid invoices and shows the payment received, GST, income tax still to set aside, your saved KiwiSaver target, the total to move, and what is left from this payment. These amounts are locked to the invoice when you record the payment, so the summary remains useful after your current rates change.

For a client who deducts withholding tax, the list also shows what was already withheld and reduces the income tax you still need to move. ACC is not allocated to individual invoices; it remains an annual estimate on the dashboard. The dashboard is also where expenses, pots, and tax payments affect your overall “Yours to spend” figure.

Before an invoice is paid, the same section is labelled Estimated Pay Summary. It is collapsed by default while the tax invoice stays open. Its one-line view shows yours to keep, total tax, and KiwiSaver. Expand it to inspect the projection. Once payment is recorded, the Pay Summary becomes the open section and the tax invoice collapses. Opening either section closes the other.

None of this requires you to update your bank balance separately. Coffer doesn't know how much arrived in your account; it knows how much the invoice was worth, and the bank balance you record on the Bank page is the truth about what actually landed. The ringfence math is the bridge between the two.

What changes about the invoice itself

Marking an invoice paid does two things to the invoice on top of the dashboard math:

• Your business details on the PDF are frozen as they are now. The business name, trading name, address, business email, GST number, GST status, bank account, account holder name, and logo that appear on that paid invoice are recorded at the moment you mark paid. If you change any of these in Settings later, the paid invoice keeps the details it was sent with.
• The invoice content is locked. Once paid, the description, line items, dates, custom fields, and so on become read-only. You can still view and download the PDF, and you can still send another copy to a new recipient, but the content of the invoice can't be edited in place.

Both behaviours exist because the invoice is a tax document once paid. The PDF stored in Coffer has to match what your client received and what your filed GST return references. Letting a settings change quietly rewrite an old invoice would mean the client's copy and your stored copy disagree.

Fixing the payment date

If you got the date wrong when you marked the invoice paid, you can fix it in place. Open the invoice and update the payment date. Coffer accepts the change without asking you to unmark it first, and the frozen business details on the PDF stay exactly as they were. The activity feed and GST-period assignment update to match the corrected date.

Editing the rest of a paid invoice

For anything other than the payment date (line items, description, custom fields, the client, dates, and so on), Coffer asks you to unmark the invoice first:

1. Click Unmark paid on the invoice.
2. Make your changes.
3. Click Mark paid again.

The frozen business details on the PDF stay frozen through this cycle. Marking the invoice paid the first time is the lock-in moment for your business details, and unmarking and re-marking don't re-touch them. So if you changed your business name in Settings between the original mark-paid and now, the paid invoice continues to show the original name even after you re-mark it. That is the right behaviour, because the PDF in your client's inbox shows the original too. Coffer doesn't keep a history of paid and unpaid flips, so if you need to track why a status changed, leave a note on the invoice.

If you need to re-snapshot the business details (eg. you caught a typo in your business name shortly after the first mark-paid), the path is: unmark, delete the invoice, create a new one. Coffer treats the original mark-paid as the lock-in point that doesn't un-happen, because that's what makes the paid invoice a reliable historical record.

Sending another copy of a paid invoice to a new contact (forwarding to your accountant, for example) is not considered an edit and works without unmarking. The PDF renders from the frozen details, so the new copy looks identical to what the original recipient got.