When a business provides services or goods to a customer, it issues a document called an invoice. The invoice is a request for payment that indicates the details of the transaction that took place, what was provided, quantities, price, payment terms, etc.

Read more about what an invoice is on Xero or QuickBooks.

On Cash Flow Frog invoices represent money owed to you by your customers - Payments your customers have to make for services or goods you have provided them.

Your invoices balance is always easily noticed at the top of the forecast page.

Note that your Invoices balance refers only to outstanding invoices. Paid invoices represent payments that have already been deposited in your bank account, which is a part of your Cash on Hand.
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Outstanding invoices are added to your forecast as cash-in transactions that will take place on the invoices' expected dates. 

The expected date is calculated based on each customer's historical payment habits, for example, if a customer usually pays 5 days after his due date Cash Flow Frog will automatically set all of his outstanding invoices to be expected for collection as due date + 5 days.

The expected dates rules can be edited in the settings as explained in the settings section below

For example:
Let's say you issued a $10,000 invoice, due on January 20th. but this specific customer usually paid 5 days late, the invoice will appear in your forecast as a $10,000 cash-in transaction on January 25th and affect your cash balance accordingly. 

When your client pays the invoice, money is deposited in your bank account. When you reconcile your bank account, changes to your balance are updated on your accounting software. The data is synced with Cash Flow Frog automatically, the invoice moves to your past transactions and changes to your bank account balance are updated on your Cash on Hand.

The forecasting algorithm expects invoices to be collected on their expected dates. So, when an invoice's expected date arrives and its payment hasn't been collected yet, the software pushes the expected date one day ahead, showing that the invoice will be collected tomorrow.

Cash Flow Frog will indicate as seen below if the invoice has been pushed forward.

This process repeats every day until one of these terms is met:

Cash Flow Frog gives you the freedom to edit invoices' data, in order to reflect changes that you think might happen, without affecting the original invoices on your accounting software. Edit expected dates, details, amounts or even exclude specific invoices from your forecast altogether.

For example, if you think that an invoice payment is going to be made later than it is due, you can push the expected date so that the forecast will show the payment coming in later.
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Please notice that editing invoices affect only the Scenario you are in and not all scenarios. As well, all edits on Cash Flow Frog affect only your forecast scenarios and never affect your accounting software data.

Decide how the software should refer to your invoices: