Automate Your Team Invoicing

Manually creating invoices every month is tedious. If your team bills multiple clients for recurring services, the repetitive work adds up fast — creating drafts, adding line items, sending payment links, chasing overdue invoices.

With the Ponkan API, you can automate the entire invoicing workflow. This guide shows you how to build a script that creates, finalizes, and tracks invoices for your whole team.

How invoicing works in Ponkan

Every invoice follows a lifecycle:

• Draft — You're still building the invoice. Line items and amounts can be edited. The customer can't see it yet.
• Open — The invoice is finalized and locked. A payment link is generated for the customer.
• Paid — The customer has paid (or you've marked it as paid manually).
• Void — The invoice was cancelled.

This state machine is enforced by the API. You can't edit an open invoice or finalize a paid one. This keeps your financial records clean and auditable.

Setting up

You'll need an API token with write permissions. Create one in Settings > API in your Ponkan dashboard.

For this guide, we'll use simple curl commands. In production, you'd wrap these in your language of choice — the example storefront in our repo shows how to do this with TypeScript.

Step 1: Create your customers

Before you can invoice someone, they need to exist as a customer:

Do this once per client. Save the returned id — you'll use it for every invoice.

Step 2: Create a draft invoice

Create an invoice with line items in a single request:

The invoice is created in draft status with an auto-generated invoice number (e.g., INV-0043). The total is calculated automatically from line items — in this case, $3,600.00.

Mixing products and freeform items

Line items can reference existing products from your catalog or be freeform descriptions. This is useful when you bill for both products and services:

Step 3: Review and edit

While the invoice is still a draft, you can update anything — line items, due date, memo, even the customer:

When you pass items, the entire line item list is replaced. This keeps things simple — no need to track individual item IDs.

Step 4: Finalize and send

When you're happy with the invoice, finalize it:

This does three things:

1. Locks the invoice — no more edits allowed
2. Sets issued_at to the current timestamp
3. Generates a payment_token for the payment link

The payment link follows this pattern:

Share this link with your customer via email, Slack, or however your team communicates with clients. The customer clicks the link, sees the invoice details, and pays online.

Step 5: Track payment status

Check individual invoices

The status field tells you exactly where things stand: draft, open, paid, void, or overdue.

Find overdue invoices

Filter your invoice list to surface overdue invoices that need follow-up:

Mark as paid manually

If a client pays via bank transfer, check, or cash, mark it manually:

Automating the whole thing

Here's a simple bash script that creates and finalizes invoices for multiple clients at the start of each month:

Run this with a cron job on the 1st of each month and your invoicing is fully automated.

Voiding invoices

Made a mistake? Void an open invoice before the customer pays:

The payment link immediately stops working. You can then create a corrected invoice.

Building it into your workflow

The API makes it straightforward to integrate invoicing into whatever tools your team already uses:

• Cron jobs — Generate monthly invoices automatically
• Slack bots — Get notified when invoices are paid or go overdue
• Project management tools — Create invoices when milestones are completed
• Accounting software — Sync invoice data for bookkeeping

What's next

Now that your invoicing is automated, explore checkout links for one-off product sales, or learn how to build a full storefront with the Ponkan API.