# Work your invoice list without opening a single invoice

> The invoice list is a triage surface, not an archive. Every row names the business the way you know it, says how late it is in plain English, and flags a draft that has been sitting. A summary strip and five status filters narrow the feed, and an open invoice takes a payment without leaving the page. The same fields reach an AI assistant over MCP, so "which invoices are late and who are they for" is one question, not a spreadsheet.

URL: https://biloh.com.au/docs/how-to/work-your-invoice-list
Category: How-to guides | Audience: operator | Updated: 2026-08-27

Most invoice screens are archives: a list of numbers, a status word, a date. You open five of them to find the one that needs you. The Biloh invoice list is built for the opposite job — deciding, in one pass, what needs chasing today and what can wait.

Three things make that possible on the row itself: the business is named the way **you** know it, the ageing is stated in words rather than a date you have to subtract from, and drafts declare their own age.

## What is each row telling me?

A row carries four facts, in the order you actually use them:

| On the row | What it is |
|---|---|
| Invoice number + business name | The trading name — the name you'd use on the phone |
| A muted second line | The registered legal entity, when it differs from the trading name |
| Amount, and amount still due | Total, plus the outstanding balance when part-paid |
| The ageing phrase | `14 days overdue`, `due in 3 days`, `due today`, or `draft · 6 days old` |

The ageing phrase is the part that changes how the list reads. `due 2026-09-02` asks you to do arithmetic against today's date, in your head, for every row. `14 days overdue` does not. Overdue rows render the phrase in red; everything else stays quiet.

Drafts get their own phrase because a draft has no meaningful due date — it has an **age**. A draft that has been sitting for six days is the row most likely to be costing you money, and on a date-sorted archive it is invisible.

## What does the summary strip tell me?

Above the filters, a single line states the position:

> 9 drafts · 4 awaiting payment · $2,140.00 outstanding · 1 overdue

Underneath it, in smaller type: **Across the 100 most recent invoices.**

That second line is deliberate. The strip counts exactly the rows the feed returned, and it says so. A summary that implied it covered your whole ledger would be a number you could act on and be wrong about, so the scope travels with the figure. `outstanding` counts issued invoices only — a draft is not money owed yet.

## How do I narrow the feed?

Five filters, applied instantly with no page reload:

- **All** — everything
- **Drafts** — not yet sent
- **Awaiting payment** — sent, partially paid, overdue or disputed
- **Overdue** — past its due date with money still owing
- **Paid** — settled

Filters compose with the search box, so *Overdue* plus a typed name gives you one client's late invoices. Search matches the invoice number, the trading name **and** the legal name — you can find a business by either name, whichever one you happened to remember.

## Can I take a payment without leaving the list?

Yes. Any invoice that is open and still owing carries a **Record payment…** action on the row. It opens a panel over the list, records against that invoice, and returns you to the feed with the row updated — no navigation, no losing your filter.

Payments recorded this way go through the same governed path as everywhere else, so the audit trail and the outstanding balance stay in one place. See [how payment terms are decided](/docs/explanation/how-payment-terms-are-decided) for what governs the due date in the first place.

## Is an invoice "overdue" the moment it passes its due date?

On every read surface, yes.

There are two notions of overdue in any billing system: the **stored** status on the record, and the **actual** position today. The stored status only changes when a scheduled sweep runs. The list, the invoice detail page and the MCP tool therefore derive the display position live, against today in **your** tenant's timezone — never UTC, which for an Australian operator would show yesterday as today for most of the working morning.

The practical consequence is the one that costs money: filtering for overdue returns stored-overdue invoices **and** sent invoices already past their due date. An operator chasing late payers cannot miss an invoice merely because a sweep has not reached it yet. The stored `status` field still reports exactly what is persisted — the derivation is display-only and mutates nothing.

## Can my assistant read this list too?

Yes, and it gets the same fields — not a thinner version. Asking an AI assistant connected over MCP *"list the unpaid invoices and tell me who each one is for and how late it is"* returns the trading name, the legal name, the live overdue position and the ageing phrase on every row, resolved in one batched read.

That matters for a specific reason: before this shipped, the invoice tool returned a client **id** and no name at all, so an assistant working your receivables was less informed than you were. The exact field list is in [the invoice list field reference](/docs/reference/invoice-list-fields).

## What if I'd rather see legal names first?

Change a setting, not the product. Two tenant-level tunables govern the naming on operator surfaces:

- `directory.entity_display_name_preference` — `trading_first` (the default) or `legal_first`
- `directory.show_legal_name_secondary` — whether the second line appears at all

Both are editable in Settings and by your assistant over MCP, on every plan. Neither changes what prints on a tax invoice. The reasoning is in [trading name versus legal entity](/docs/explanation/trading-name-versus-legal-entity).

## Related

- [Trading name versus legal entity](/docs/explanation/trading-name-versus-legal-entity)
- [How payment terms are decided on an invoice](/docs/explanation/how-payment-terms-are-decided)
- [The invoice list field reference](/docs/reference/invoice-list-fields)
- [When completing a job bills the client](/docs/concepts/when-completing-a-job-bills-the-client)
- [Verify an email actually reached your client](/docs/how-to/verify-an-email-reached-your-client)