An invoice is a separate document raised from a jobcard, and it moves through a fixed lifecycle. Everything before issued is provisional; everything after is locked.
The states
| Status | Means |
|---|---|
draft | Editable. Refresh rebuilds it from the jobcard; Delete draft removes it. No number yet. |
issued | Numbered, dated, due date set, locked as a VAT record. |
sent | Set automatically when you Send Invoice by email. |
part paid | Payments recorded, but less than the frozen total. |
paid | Recorded payments cover the frozen total. |
cancelled | Reversed by a credit note, via Cancel invoice or Amend. |
Calculated, not manual
You can't set the paid states by hand. Recording a payment moves the invoice to PART PAID, and to PAID once the total is covered; the comparison is always against the total frozen at issue time. A £0 invoice has nothing to collect, so it is issued straight to PAID. Credit notes are the exception: they stay at ISSUED, because "paid" means nothing on a document that reverses money rather than collecting it.
Overdue is a badge, not a status
When an unpaid invoice passes its due date, Pistonlog shows an OVERDUE badge. It's derived on the fly from the due date; the stored status doesn't change.
What Refresh does to a draft
Refresh is a full re-pull, not a merge. It rebuilds all four frozen snapshots on the draft (line items, customer, vehicle and garage) from the jobcard as it stands right now, and it re-reads your current pricing settings, so a labour rate or markup changed since the draft was created is picked up.
Anything you typed on the draft itself is discarded: manual line changes, the whole-invoice discount, and any lines you marked internal. Fix things on the jobcard first, then Refresh, then redo the draft-only bits.
Cancelling and amending
Both paths issue a reversing credit note against the original, and both require a reason:
- Cancel invoice reverses it, full stop.
- Amend reverses it and also creates a replacement draft, rebuilt fresh from the jobcard.
Any payments already recorded stay attached to the original invoice. See Amending an invoice.