Proforma Invoices

A proforma invoice is a statement of what a stay is expected to cost, issued before the money moves. A corporate client needs it to raise a purchase order; a guest or an agent needs it to get a transfer approved. It carries the property's details, the payer's details, the stay, every expected charge, the tax, the total and the deposit you are asking for up front.

What makes it a proforma rather than a bill is that it posts nothing. The folio is untouched, no journal entry is derived from it, and no city-ledger balance moves. It is a snapshot of the folio's figures on the day you issued it, stored as its own document. That is precisely why you can issue a fresh one whenever the booking changes, or void one outright, without leaving a hole in anything.

Three documents, three jobs

The proforma itself says so on paper: "This proforma invoice is a statement of expected charges and a request for payment. It is not a tax invoice and does not record a sale; a tax invoice is issued when the stay is settled."

Where it lives

Open the reservation and choose the Folio tab (or Billing & Folio at /billing, then View Folio). A Proforma button sits in the folio's action row beside Add Charge and Record Payment. It appears only while the stay is still On Hold, Confirmed or In-House — a statement of expected charges makes no sense once the guest has departed.

Once a booking has at least one proforma, a Proforma invoices panel appears above the folio's line items, headed Expected charges, issued for a PO or a prepayment. Not a tax invoice. The panel is hidden on a booking with none, so the ledger stays at the top of the screen for the stays that never need one.

The same documents also appear on the payer's own record: open the partner under Companies & agents and choose the Invoices tab. The proformas sit above the tax invoices there, with a Booking column linking back to each stay — which is what you want when a company's accounts-payable team calls about a reference.

Issue a proforma

The dialog refuses to issue when the booking is outside On Hold, Confirmed and In-House ("A proforma can only be issued for a held, confirmed or in-house booking"), when Bill to is Company and no account is chosen ("Choose the company to bill: this booking is not billed to one"), and when there is nothing to put on the document ("There are no charges on this booking yet").

What goes on the document

The figures come from the folio exactly as it stands, because the folio already holds the whole stay the moment the booking is created: a room charge per room segment and a tax line per tax. Nothing is re-priced for the proforma.

Three things happen to those lines on the way onto the document:

• Voided lines and their reversals are both left out. A proforma shows what is expected, not the corrections that got there.
• Tax lines and re-pricing adjustments are folded into one line per description, so the document reads as the stay's current price rather than the original plus its corrections. Room charges and extras stay as posted, one line per room or item.
• Lines are grouped in the order a reader expects: accommodation, extras, fees, discounts, then taxes.

On paper the document is headed PROFORMA INVOICE with the property's block (legal name, address, TIN, contact), the issue date and Valid until, a Bill to block (name, address, TIN, email) and a Stay block (guest, dates, nights, rooms and the booking reference). The charge table has Description, Qty, Unit price and Amount, each row tagged with its kind — Accommodation, Extras, Fees, Discounts — followed by the tax lines, Subtotal and Total. When a deposit is asked for, two further rows read Deposit due now and Balance due at the property. Payment and Notes sections follow, then the not-a-tax-invoice footnote.

How the deposit is suggested

Leave Deposit due now empty and Innvera reads the property's house deposit policy — Deposit & Pre-Authorisation on the Hotel Policies page (see Policies):

With Deposit required at booking switched off, nothing is suggested and the document asks for the full amount on arrival. The suggestion is always capped at the total, so a 30 % deposit on a stay re-priced down to nothing is nothing.

Statuses

The badge on each row carries the number of the document that replaced it where there is one.

Superseded and voided documents stay in the panel, greyed, because a client may still be holding the paper — the desk has to be able to say which document was which. Open any of them and a banner says so in full:

• SUPERSEDED — a newer proforma has been issued for this booking.
• VOID — this proforma has been cancelled and must not be paid.
• SETTLED — a tax invoice has since been issued for this stay.

Superseding

Issuing a proforma with Supersede this booking's other open proformas left ticked marks every other Issued proforma for that booking Superseded and points each one at the new document. This is the normal case: the booking changed, the figures changed, and a client holding two live proformas for one stay cannot tell which to pay. Untick it only when you deliberately want two live documents — a split bill being approved by two different buyers, say.

Becoming Invoiced

A proforma turns Invoiced the moment a tax invoice exists for its stay, which happens in two ways:

• A balance is transferred to the city ledger. Either from the account's page with Transfer folio, or at check-out for a company-billed stay. See Receivables & city ledger.
• An OTA remittance invoice is raised. An OTA-collected channel booking raises one automatically on the channel's account when it checks out — see Negotiated rates & company billing.

The link is kept both ways: the proforma names the invoice, so anyone holding the proforma can be pointed at the document that actually bills the money.

Actions on the panel

Each row in Proforma invoices carries four icon actions:

Email it

The Email {number} dialog sends a cover note with the figures and the proforma attached as a PDF, and names the last send when there was one. To is prefilled with the bill-to email but editable, because purchase orders often go to a buyer rather than the accounts-payable inbox; Cc and a Message (Please quote your PO number with the transfer…) are optional. Click Send email.

The mail is subject-lined Proforma invoice {number} — {property} and replies go to the property's own address. "Proforma {number} emailed to {addresses}" confirms it, and the row's email icon then shows when it was last sent and to whom. Up to ten recipients; a malformed address is refused ("Not an email address: …"), a document with no address to send to asks for one ("No email address: the bill-to has none on file, so give one to send to"), and a voided document cannot be sent at all. If the mail provider refuses the message, nothing is recorded — the document stays listed for a retry.

Void it

Click the void icon. The confirmation reads Void {number}? — The document will read VOID when opened again. Anyone holding a copy should be told not to pay against it. A Reason is required (Client cancelled the purchase order…); Void proforma commits it, and "Proforma {number} voided" confirms it.

Only an Issued proforma can be voided. Anything else is refused by name — "A superseded proforma cannot be voided", "A converted proforma cannot be voided" — because there is nothing to cancel: it has already been replaced or billed.

Numbering

Proformas have their own gapless series, separate from invoices, credit notes and receipts. The prefix is the Proforma prefix under Settings › Accounting › Numbering & approvals, PI- by default, and numbers are five digits wide: PI-00042, or PI-2026-00042 with Reset the sequence each year on.

A proforma is not a fiscal document, so the series does not have to be gapless — but it is anyway, because "PI-00042" is something a client quotes back in an email six weeks later and it should mean exactly one document. The number is allocated last, after every check has passed, so a refused issue never burns one.

Tips

• Issue it from the folio, not the company page. The figures come from the stay, so the stay is where the document starts. The company page is for finding one again.
• Re-issue rather than explain. When the booking changes, issue a new proforma and let it supersede the old one. The client gets one live document and the old figures stay on file.
• Use Room and taxes only for a company PO. A purchase order raised against a total that includes the guest's minibar will be queried by their finance team.
• Set the payment instructions once. Fill them in under Settings › Accounting › Numbering & approvals and every proforma carries them; override per document only when the money should go elsewhere.

Common mistakes

• Treating it as the bill. A proforma posts nothing: receiving the money against it is a separate act. Record the deposit on the folio with Record Payment → Deposit (see Payments).
• Voiding instead of superseding. Void a document the client should not pay at all. When the price merely changed, issue a new one — the supersede chain explains itself; a void with no successor does not.
• Expecting it on the tax return. Nothing on a proforma reaches revenue, tax or the city ledger. Only the folio's own postings and the tax invoice do.

Related

• Invoices
• Folios
• Receivables & city ledger
• Companies & agents
• Accounting settings