Repeating or recurring invoices, where you bill a customer the same amount every month or every year, are a really common need for businesses working in HubSpot. Whether you are a SaaS company billing a subscription, an agency billing a retainer, or anything in between, ScaleXP Invoicing makes recurring billing easy if you use Xero or QuickBooks Online. This article explains how recurring invoices work, how to create them from a HubSpot deal, how to automate billing and collect payments, and how to change or cancel a template when a customer upgrades or churns.

How ScaleXP Invoicing works with repeating invoices

ScaleXP Invoicing builds on the native repeating invoice function inside your accounting platform, whether that is Xero or QuickBooks Online. When you create a repeating invoice, you are creating a template that your accounting platform uses to generate the individual invoices on a regular schedule. This is ideal because you can integrate your billing with HubSpot without changing your accounting process.

Xero or QuickBooks Online generates the one-off invoices on the schedule you decide, creating them either as draft invoices or sending them out automatically. Because your accounting platform does the work, you can be confident that everything is correct and uses the same templates, sign-off processes, and reporting that are already in place.

When those individual invoices are created by your accounting platform, ScaleXP Invoicing picks them up and tracks them in HubSpot, along with any payments or overdue invoices. So if your third instalment is overdue, you can see this right inside HubSpot.

How to create a repeating invoice in HubSpot

Repeating invoices are a core feature of ScaleXP Invoicing, and the platform is flexible enough to handle almost any billing scenario. You can link multiple invoices and repeating invoices to a single HubSpot deal. For example, if you have a one-off deposit followed by a monthly recurring fee, that is no problem.

Once you have installed ScaleXP Invoicing, follow these steps:

1. Open your deal in HubSpot and click the Create Invoices button.
2. Create the repeating invoice in one of two ways. You can manually create it by clicking the button inside ScaleXP Invoicing, or, the option we recommend, you can autofill from your HubSpot line items.
3. Check the contact and confirm the billing details are correct.
4. At the top of the screen you will see either a Total (if the repeating invoice is ongoing) or a Projected Total (if you have a fixed term). Review this figure.
5. Click Sync to add the repeating invoice to your accounting platform.

If you are using HubSpot line items or quotes, ScaleXP Invoicing picks up the following properties from your line items and creates a mix of invoices accordingly:

• Billing Frequency (for example, one-off, monthly, or annually)
• Billing Term (for example, 12 months)
• Billing Start Date (for example, 01/01/2024)

For most users, if your HubSpot line items are set up correctly, it is a single click to start ScaleXP Invoicing with all your invoices ready to go. Any line items set to one-off are added to a standalone invoice. For more on how line item properties map across, see how to set up the ScaleXP Invoicing HubSpot integration.

How to automate your invoicing

Once your repeating invoices are stored in your accounting platform, your accounting platform manages generating invoices on the schedule you set. This is an important principle: your accounting platform is always in control of your billing.

The individual invoices are generated on the invoice date, though with QuickBooks Online you can configure the invoice to be created a number of days beforehand. When the invoices are created, the information is copied from the repeating invoice template and each invoice is given a due date and invoice number.

Depending on your settings, invoices are either generated as a draft invoice or sent automatically. You configure this in the repeating invoice options inside Xero or in the repeating invoice template inside QuickBooks Online.

You can also automate the creation of invoices directly from HubSpot workflows. See how to automate your HubSpot invoices for details.

Automate and track payments from repeating invoices

Both Xero and QuickBooks Online support auto-pay, which means you can automatically bill customers using the existing payment methods embedded in your accounting platform. If you collect payments this way, your accounting platform marks your invoices as paid automatically. If you are using manual payments, the invoices are marked as paid once you reconcile the payment. Either way, once an invoice is paid, that status is sent right back to HubSpot by ScaleXP Invoicing.

ScaleXP Invoicing updates over 20 deal properties automatically, including:

• Recurring revenue: MRR and ARR
• Invoice status, for example all invoices paid
• Number of invoices, and number paid
• Next invoice date
• Total of invoices to date
• Overdue invoices

These are standard HubSpot deal properties, so you can use them in reports and workflows. For the full list, see adding invoice properties to HubSpot deals.

Cancelling and changing repeating invoices

If you want to make a change to your invoices, for example when a customer churns or upgrades, you can do this right inside HubSpot. This updates the template so that the next invoice that goes out has the correct value. You can see all individual invoices and any changes inside the ScaleXP Invoicing window.

Alternatively, if you do not want your teams to make these changes inside HubSpot, you can turn off editing capabilities. If you do this, you can edit either the template or the individual one-off invoices as you normally would inside your accounting platform. All these changes are synced back to HubSpot by ScaleXP Invoicing, so all your data stays in sync.

Quirks with Xero and QuickBooks Online

There are a couple of quirks in how each accounting platform works. Here are the main ones to keep an eye out for:

• Xero does not let you change or cancel templates, so in the background ScaleXP Invoicing deletes and recreates the template. Do not worry, this is all tracked on your HubSpot deal.
• QuickBooks Online generates repeating invoices overnight. So if you have a repeating invoice that is supposed to start billing today, ScaleXP Invoicing asks whether you would like to turn that into a one-off invoice for today and continue billing from the next billing date.

Related articles

• How to set up ScaleXP Invoicing (Step 1): Installing the invoicing module
• ScaleXP Invoicing: invoicing setup and data mapping with HubSpot
• ScaleXP Invoicing: Automating invoice creation with HubSpot workflows
• ScaleXP Invoicing: how to create deposit invoices in HubSpot
• ScaleXP Invoicing: how to create split invoices in HubSpot