Invoices and Outstanding Balances

An invoice is what turns a request's working charges into a finalized bill. Up to the moment you generate it, the charges on a request's Billing tab are estimates — you can add, edit, and delete them freely (see Billing Charges and Estimates). Generating the invoice stamps every charge with a billing date, locks in the amount the researcher owes, and moves the request forward in the photoduplication workflow so it can be approved, paid, and delivered.

Most of the time invoicing is a single click. You finish setting up the charges on a copy request, click Generate Invoice, and Aeon both records the bill and routes the request to the next queue. From there you print or email the invoice to the researcher, take payment, and the balance drops to zero on its own.

This page covers the invoice itself — generating it, printing it, emailing it, and deleting it — and the separate, researcher-wide view of every unpaid balance on a user's record.

When you'll use this

• You've added the charges to a copy request and want to bill the researcher — click Generate Invoice.
• The researcher asks for their bill — Print Invoice for a paper copy, or Send Email to send it.
• A charge was wrong after invoicing — Delete Invoice to clear everything and start over.
• A researcher wants to know everything they owe across all their requests — open their user record's Billing tab.

The invoice lives on the request's Billing tab

Open a copy (photoduplication) request — for example request #12345 — and select the Billing tab. Across the top of the tab is the billing toolbar; below it are the Charges and Payments cards and a running balance.

Whether a request has an invoice yet is simply whether its charges have been finalized. Before you generate one, the charges show as estimates and the toolbar offers Generate Invoice. After you generate one, that button is replaced by the print, email, and Invoice menu actions described below.

Generating an invoice

1. Open request #12345 and go to the Billing tab.
2. Confirm the charges are correct. (Estimates pulled from your billing defaults are listed here too; generating the invoice saves them as real charges.)
3. Click Generate Invoice.
4. Aeon stamps every charge with today's billing date and shows "Invoice generated successfully."

The first time you generate an invoice, Aeon also routes the request forward automatically:

• The request moves to Awaiting Order Approval, and you'll see a "Request routed to Awaiting Order Approval." confirmation. (The exact queue name in the toast is whatever your site calls that queue.)
• If the invoice total is zero and your site is configured to auto-process zero-balance invoices, the request skips approval and goes straight to Awaiting Item Delivery instead.

Why the request moves on its own

Generating the invoice is the hand-off from "still being priced" to "billed and ready to collect." Routing happens only on the first generation — updating an existing invoice later (below) doesn't re-route the request.

You can't invoice without charges or a user

Aeon refuses to generate an invoice in two cases:

• No charges — there's nothing to bill. Add at least one charge first.
• No associated user — an anonymous request has no one to bill. The request must belong to a user.

Updating an invoice after the fact

Once an invoice exists, editing a charge or payment keeps it in sync, but you can also re-run the calculation explicitly:

1. On the Billing tab, open the Invoice menu in the toolbar.
2. Choose Update Invoice.
3. Aeon re-stamps the charges and confirms "Invoice updated successfully."

Updating does not move the request to a new queue.

Printing an invoice

1. With an invoice generated on request #12345, click Print Invoice in the toolbar.
2. The print dialog opens and renders a PDF preview. If more than one invoice template exists, a template picker appears at the top (it remembers your last choice); with a single template it renders that one directly.
3. Click Print to send it to your printer, or Download to save the PDF.

The layout of the printed invoice comes from the Invoice print template, which your administrator designs in the Customization Manager — see Print Designer: Invoice.

Emailing an invoice

1. Click Send Email in the toolbar.
2. The Send Email dialog opens with the invoice email pre-filled — recipient, subject, and body are populated from the ItemInvoice email template with the request's details substituted in.
3. Review and edit anything you need, then send. The dialog description reads "Review and edit the invoice email before sending."

When Send Email appears

The Send Email button only shows if you have permission to send email and to edit billing. If you don't see it, you're missing one of those two permissions (see Permissions below).

Deleting an invoice

Deleting an invoice is the way to undo a bill that was generated with the wrong charges. It is destructive: it clears all charges and all payments on the request, returning it to a pre-invoice state.

1. On the Billing tab, open the Invoice menu and choose Delete Invoice.
2. A confirmation dialog titled Delete Invoice? warns: "This will delete all billing charges and payments for this request. This action cannot be undone."
3. Click Delete Invoice to confirm.

Invoices with credit-card payments can't be deleted

If the researcher paid online by credit card, the Delete Invoice option is disabled and tagged "(has CC payments)." If you try anyway, Aeon refuses with "Cannot delete invoice with credit card payments. Contact your payment processor for refunds." Credit-card payments must be refunded through your payment processor, not removed in Aeon. (The same protection applies to deleting an individual credit-card payment.)

A researcher's outstanding balances (user record)

The request Billing tab shows one request at a time. To see everything a researcher owes across all their requests, open their user record and select the Billing tab there.

This is the view to reach for when a researcher asks "what's my total?", or when you want to print a single statement covering several unpaid requests at once.

The user Billing tab has two parts:

Balance Summary — three totals across all of this researcher's non-cancelled requests:

Tile	Meaning
Invoice Total	The sum of all charges billed to this researcher.
Payment Total	Everything they've paid so far.
Balance Remaining	What's still owed (Invoice Total minus Payment Total).

Outstanding Invoices — a table listing every request that still has a balance owing. Only requests with a balance greater than zero appear; fully paid and cancelled requests are left out. Each row shows Txn #, Item Title, Author, Format, Service, Shipping, and the per-request Invoice, Payment, and Balance amounts, with a totals row at the bottom. Click any column header to sort, and click a transaction number to jump straight to that request.

Printing a statement of unpaid balances

1. On the user's Billing tab, tick the checkbox on each request you want to include (or use the header checkbox to select all). Print Statement stays disabled until at least one row is selected.
2. Click Print Statement — the button shows a count badge of how many you've selected.
3. The print dialog opens using the Invoice Statement template, producing one combined statement of the selected requests' charges, payments, and amounts due. Click Print or Download to finish.

No balances to show

If a researcher has nothing outstanding, the table is replaced by "No outstanding invoices" / "This user has no unpaid balances."

Permissions

• Viewing an invoice's charges and payments requires Billing: View. Viewing a user's outstanding-invoices tab requires Users: View (it lives on the user record, not the request).
• Generating, updating, or deleting an invoice is enforced by the API at the Billing: Full level.
• Adding or editing individual charges and payments — and applying a service package — requires Billing: Edit; deleting a charge or payment requires Billing: Full.
• Send Email additionally requires permission to edit email (Email: Edit).

If your role is view-only for billing, the invoice and charge/payment actions are hidden or disabled.

Editor review — remove this callout (and the HTML comment below it) before publishing

A few things only an SME (or a quick code recheck) should settle on this page:

• Generate/Update Invoice permission mismatch: the API enforces Billing: Full for generate/update/delete-invoice (RequestBillingController.GenerateInvoice/DeleteInvoice), but the toolbar reveals Generate Invoice and Update Invoice at Billing: Edit (billing-toolbar.tsx gates them on canEditBilling). So a Billing: Edit user sees those buttons but the call is rejected. Decide the intended level and whether the button should be hidden at Edit — the page documents the API-enforced level (Full).
• Auto-route target: confirm documenting the first-generation route as Awaiting Order Approval by name (and the zero-balance → Awaiting Item Delivery shortcut under the AutoProcessZeroBalanceInvoices customization) is correct product behavior. The success toast itself shows the site's resolved queue display name, not a hardcoded string.
• Currency display: examples use US dollars — the UI hardcodes Intl.NumberFormat("en-US", currency: "USD") in both billing-tab and the outstanding-invoices table. Confirm USD is acceptable to state, or whether this should become locale/site-driven.
• Screenshots needed: (1) the request Billing tab toolbar before vs. after generating an invoice (showing Generate Invoice → Print Invoice / Send Email / Invoice menu); (2) the Delete Invoice? confirmation; (3) the user record Billing tab with the Balance Summary tiles and Outstanding Invoices table.

The full generation metadata — sources, files read, and verifications, i.e. the detail a tool like Claude would need to regenerate this page — is in the HTML comment directly below this callout. When this page has been reviewed and approved, delete both this callout and that comment; a page with no Editor-review callout is one that's done.