An invoice charges for one job or one delivery, and it is the document that creates the debt. A statement charges for nothing: it summarises a period, listing every invoice, credit note and payment on the account and ending with the balance still outstanding. A customer who has lost an invoice can be sent a copy; a customer who has paid two of your five invoices and cannot say which needs a statement. That is why a statement has many rows and no line items — one row per document, never one per product.

It means the amount has been outstanding for between 31 and 60 days counted from a chosen starting date — and which starting date is the part that varies. Ageing from the due date tells you what is genuinely late under the terms you gave. Ageing from the invoice date tells you how long you have been carrying the money, regardless of the terms. Neither is a rule, and different companies inside the same industry do it differently, so this tool prints the basis it used on the statement itself rather than leaving the reader to guess.

Because an opening balance cannot honestly be aged. In an activity statement, the opening figure is the sum of documents from before the period, and those documents are not on this page — nothing here knows how old they are. Sweeping them into “current” would make the whole table a guess, and sweeping them into “over 90” would be a different guess. So they stand in a column of their own, and the columns still add up to the closing balance exactly. An outstanding-items statement has no opening balance at all, so the column does not appear.

Because this tool does not allocate payments against particular invoices — nothing on the form tells it which payment cleared which document, so a payment sits in the band of its own date. A recent payment against a very old invoice therefore shows as a credit in the current band while the old invoice keeps ageing. The columns still total the balance correctly; it is the split that is misleading. The fix on a statement like this is either to send an outstanding-items statement listing only what is genuinely still unpaid, or to enter the settled invoice and its payment with matching dates so they cancel inside the same band.

No, and there is deliberately no field for it. The closing balance is the opening balance plus charges less payments and credits, all of it derived from the rows you entered. A field that lets someone type a third number only creates a way for the document to disagree with itself, and a statement whose total does not match its own rows is worse than no statement at all — the customer stops trusting every figure on it, including the correct ones.

Yes, and specifically: every amount is held and added as a whole number of cents rather than as a decimal. A forty-row statement pushes the running balance through forty consecutive additions, and floating-point decimals drift over a chain like that — the sort of drift that leaves a final balance of 4,199.999999 where the rows clearly total 4,200. Decimals exist only in what you type and in what is printed.

It is negative — the ledger convention. A balance of (120.00) means the account is in credit by 120.00, meaning you owe the customer rather than the other way round. Brackets are used instead of a minus sign because a minus at the head of a column is easy to lose on a photocopy or a scan, and a credit balance mistaken for a debt is the one error that will definitely get a phone call.

It is the part the customer tears off and returns with the payment, so that whoever opens the envelope knows which account the money belongs to. It repeats the account name, the account code, the statement number and the balance, then leaves ruled lines for the amount actually paid and the transfer reference. If your customers pay by transfer and email you the slip, that reference line is what lets you match the money to this statement without phoning anyone.

Monthly is the common rhythm, usually within the first few working days after month end, because that is when most accounts departments run their payment batch — a statement that arrives after their run waits a full cycle. Beyond that, frequency is a commercial decision rather than a rule: some suppliers send statements only to accounts that are overdue, others to everyone every month as a reconciliation courtesy.

This tool produces a document; it does not start any procedure. A statement is a summary and a reminder, and what you can do about an unpaid balance comes from your contract and from the law where you and your customer are, not from the format of the paper. What a statement is genuinely good for is removing excuses: once a customer has a dated list of every document and has not disputed it, “we never received the invoice” stops being available.

No. The statement is assembled by your own browser and nothing is sent over the network — the site is static files with no server behind it. One thing is kept, and only when you ask for it: pressing Save profile stores your own company details, currency, payment terms, bank details and ageing settings, so it stays in your browser and goes when you clear your browser data. The customer and every row of their ledger are never written to storage — that is somebody else’s financial history, and month-end statements get run on shared office machines.

Because a statement runs long, and a column of numbers with no heading above it cannot be read — on page three, which figure is the debit and which is the running balance? The document measures its own content, packs it into A4 sheets, and re-inserts the heading row whenever a page starts mid-table. The page break is decided before printing, so the preview shows exactly where the paper will split.