Invoicing

Sessional turns delivered sessions and shifts into invoices, emails each one as a PDF with a signed link the organisation can open without an account, and tracks the money without turning you into the chaser. The link is what is signed; the PDF is an ordinary PDF and carries no digital signature.

Not all work becomes a Sessional invoice. Work paid through an agency or through payroll skips the invoice step entirely.

Expenses you have marked for the organisation to pay are offered when you create the invoice and go on as their own lines, dated. Mileage can be typed directly or come from your expense log, and a typed mileage line can be saved to Expenses at the HMRC rate in the same step. See Billing an expense to an organisation→ in the Expenses guide.

Invoice numbers follow the format SES-260907-A1B2C the date as year, month and day, followed by five random letters and digits, so a number cannot be guessed from the one before it. Invoices raised before October 2026 keep their older, longer numbers, and an invoice you imported keeps the number it already had.

Once an invoice is issued, you can send it by email with the PDF attached and a signed link. The organisation can open the link with no account, see the invoice detail, and either say it has paid or raise a dispute. If they say they have paid, you confirm it against your bank before the invoice becomes Paid.

Sending always asks first. On the last step of the invoice wizard, Create and send to organisation shows the amount and the address it will go to and waits for you to confirm; the other button creates the invoice without emailing anyone. The wizard keeps what you have typed in the tab if you reload or step back, until the invoice is created.

When an organisation raises a dispute or says it has paid from its link, you get a notification that names the organisation, the invoice and the amount, and an email as well unless you have switched off Invoice reminders in your notification preferences→. The organisation's own page shows the outcome afterwards: a rejected dispute reads as still payable, an accepted one tells them not to pay that invoice, and a voided invoice that you corrected and sent again shows the number of its replacement. The organisation is not emailed about those outcomes or about a void, so tell them yourself where it matters.

Move invoices through statuses as payments progress. The dashboard shows outstanding, overdue, and acknowledgement states at a glance.

Marking an invoice paid, voiding it or issuing it works on every plan, including Basic. Plus and Pro add intermediate status tracking and manual and automatic chasers. On Basic, a voided invoice still counts towards the month's invoice allowance; the one exception is a same-month correction that re-raises exactly the work that was on the voided invoice. Compare Sessional plans→ for the monthly invoice allowance on Basic and what Plus removes.

Keep regular CSV exports so you hold your own copy of your records. Each CSV file holds up to 500 rows, so export a period at a time if you have more. Sole traders should keep tax records for at least 5 years after the 31 January submission deadline for the tax year. Limited companies should keep records for 6 years from the end of the company financial year.

You can bundle multiple delivered bookings from the same organisation into one invoice. On your Sessions page (Shifts, if your profession works shifts), tick the ones you want, then create the invoice from there.

An issued invoice cannot be edited. If you need to correct a detail, void the invoice, update the booking or profile information, and raise a new one. Void and raise a corrected invoice does both in one step: it is offered on any issued, acknowledged or overdue invoice the organisation already holds, and after an organisation's dispute is accepted, and it starts the replacement with the original's mileage, expenses, extra lines and note already carried over. A plain Void of an invoice the organisation holds tells you first that they are not emailed about it.

A voided invoice keeps its lines, so you can still see exactly what the organisation was sent. The work on it returns to delivered and can be invoiced again, and any expenses on it go back to waiting to be billed.