Different business policies might require different options for invoicing:
- The Invoice what is ordered rule is used as default mode in Odoo Sales, which means that customers will be invoiced once the sales order is confirmed.
- The Invoice what is delivered rule will invoice customers once the delivery is done. This rule concerns businesses that sell materials, liquids or food in large quantities. In these cases, the quantity might diverge a little bit and it is, therefore, preferable to invoice the quantity actually delivered.
Being able to have different invoicing options allow you more flexibility. Indeed, you need to know exactly how to invoice your customers for different situations.
Activate these features
Go to and under Invoicing policy choose the rule you want to apply.
Important
If you decide to choose the Invoice what is delivered rule, you will not be able to activate the feature called Automatic invoice, which automatically generates invoices when the online payment is confirmed.
Choose an invoicing policy on a product form
From any product page, under the Sales tab, you will find the invoicing policy, which can be manually changed.
Impact on sales flow
On Odoo Sales, the basic sales flow will be to create a quotation, send it to your customer, wait for confirmation, confirm the sales order and create an invoice.
- Invoice what is ordered: No impact on this basic sales flow. Indeed, you can invoice as soon as the sale is confirmed.
Invoice what is delivered: Small impact on sales flow because you will have to manually enter the delivered quantity on the sales order or to install the Inventory App to confirm the delivered quantity before creating an invoice, with the Sales App. Indeed, if you try to create an invoice without validating the delivered quantity, you will receive an error message as below.
Note
Once the quotation is confirmed and that the status went from Quotation sent to Sales order, you are able to see your delivered and invoiced quantities directly from your sales order (it is true for both rules).
Odoo will automatically add the quantities to the invoice (even if it is a partial delivery).
Finally, to create an invoice, you will have different possibilities: regular invoice or down payment (percentage or fixed amount).
Important
Be sure to check out our documentation about down payment here: Request a down payment, to master this incredible feature.