Invoicing built for the music business.

What you invoice for

Producer fees. Mixing and engineering fees. Studio time and session costs. Advances and milestone payments. Management commission. Costs recharged to a client. Brand and sync fees. Anything a music team bills for, against the agreement it came from.

What is in it

Invoices generated from deals. Record, publishing, master, brand and catalog deals all carry invoices, and deals still missing one can be listed so nothing is quietly left unbilled.

Line items with quantity and unit price. Ordered how you want them, so a session at a day rate and a flat fee sit on the same document without a workaround.

Commission tracked to the detail, not just the total. A recharged cost and a commissionable fee can sit on the same invoice without one distorting the other, so what you are owed comes out right the first time.

Multi-currency, with a default per client. Set once, not chosen per invoice. Commission can settle in a different currency from the invoice itself.

VAT. A rate on the invoice, not a manual line you remember to add.

Payment terms. Net 30, Net 60 or a custom due date, with issued and paid dates held against the record.

PO numbers and SWIFT details. The fields international payers ask for before they will process anything.

Status through the whole life of the invoice. Draft, sent, in transit, paid, cancelled.

Branded PDFs, sent by email. With a filename convention you set — client, counterparty, invoice number, dates, amount — so what lands in someone's inbox is already filed correctly.

What makes music invoicing different

You are usually billing on someone else's money. A management invoice is a percentage of income the client received from somebody else. The invoice is only as good as the statement behind it — and the statement arrives late, in a different currency, from a party who is not the one paying you.

Two different invoicing jobs get confused for one. Where a business manager issues the client's own invoices, the manager still has to invoice for commission, and separately for costs recharged to the client. Different documents, different payers, and treating them as one is where commission quietly goes uncollected.

The payer is often not the client. Where a letter of direction is in place, the label, publisher or distributor remits your share directly. The invoice still has to reconcile to the client's account.

An invoice is a claim about a deal. Unlike hourly billing, a music invoice points at a contract — a rate, a term, a set of works. If the invoice and the deal disagree, the invoice is what gets questioned.

Four things worth getting right

Invoice against the agreement, not from memory. The rate, what it applies to, and what comes off the top first are all in the contract. Restating them by hand is where errors enter.

State the period and the source. “Q3 mechanical, per the statement dated X” survives a query. “Commission” does not.

Set the currency per client, once. Not per invoice, and not in your head.

Send it when the income lands, not at month end. The delay between income arriving and the invoice going out is usually the largest single cause of slow payment, and it is entirely self-inflicted.