There's a particular kind of busywork that quietly eats your week: rebuilding the same invoice, for the same client, at the same amount, on the same day of every month. It's the retainer you re-bill on the first. The subscription you charge every 30 days. The annual renewal you almost forget until the client emails asking where their invoice is. None of it is hard. It's just relentless — and every manual touch is a chance to send late, fat-finger a number, or miss a cycle entirely and leave money on the table.

Recurring invoices take that whole loop off your plate. Instead of creating a fresh invoice each billing period, you build the bill once, tell it how often to repeat, and let the platform generate and send every future copy on schedule. Ajax Union MarTech handles this with a dedicated recurring template that lives right alongside your one-time invoices, so the customers, products, and payment connection you've already set up carry straight over. Set it once, and your predictable revenue starts collecting itself.

This guide covers the full lifecycle: building a recurring template, dialing in the frequency, controlling when it starts and stops, reading the status labels that tell you what you can and can't change, and — most importantly — the one move that actually shuts a recurring series off when you need it to.

How a Recurring Invoice Is Different

A standard invoice is a single document for a single charge. A recurring invoice is a template — a master set of instructions the platform uses to spin up new invoices on a schedule you define. That distinction matters, because almost everything that's unique about recurring billing flows from it: the frequency settings, the start and end conditions, the status labels, and the rule about when the template locks.

If you only need to bill a customer once, you want a regular invoice, and the standard invoicing guide walks through that. Reach for a recurring invoice when the relationship is ongoing: monthly retainers, subscription plans, membership dues, installment payments, or any service you deliver on a repeating cycle.

Before You Start

Recurring invoices run on a connected payment processor, so make sure Stripe is linked to your account before you build your first template. With that connection live, every invoice the template generates can be paid directly from the link your customer receives, and each payment is recorded against the right billing cycle automatically. If Stripe isn't connected yet, set that up first — everything below assumes it's in place.

Building Your First Recurring Template

From the left menu, open Payments > Invoices & Estimates. This is the home for everything billing-related, one-time and recurring alike. Click the New button in the top right, then choose New Recurring Invoice — that's the option that flags this as a repeating template rather than a single charge.

From there, the front of the build looks familiar. Enter your business information, select the customer who'll be billed, and pull in the products or services from your catalog, setting pricing, quantities, and taxes as you go. If you've sent a one-time invoice before, none of this is new ground. The recurring magic happens in the next few settings.

Setting the Frequency

The How often? dropdown is the heart of the whole feature. It controls the rhythm of your billing, and it's flexible enough to match almost any business model — daily, weekly, monthly, yearly, or a custom interval you define.

It helps to think in three patterns. The first is regular intervals, where invoices generate at an even time gap and keep going until you stop them. Set a 7-day interval with a first invoice due July 5, and the next lands July 12, then July 19, and so on indefinitely. This is the workhorse setting for weekly or monthly subscriptions.

The second is specific days, where billing aligns to a calendar position rather than a fixed gap — say, the first Monday of every month. This suits monthly retainers and any business that bills on a predictable day rather than a rolling count. You can pair it with an end condition, like stopping after the first Monday in December.

The third is annual billing, a single charge on the same date each year — ideal for yearly memberships, renewals, and annual service fees. Choose December 31 and set it to five occurrences, and the series runs each year for five years, then completes itself.

Start Date, End Condition, and Sending Early

Two more settings define the window your billing runs in. The Start Date sets when the first invoice goes out, and the End condition decides when the series stops — either on a specific date or after a set number of occurrences. Together they keep a recurring invoice from running longer than the agreement it's billing for.

There's also a send in advance option worth using. It releases each invoice a few days ahead of its due date, giving customers a window to review and pay before the deadline rather than scrambling on the day. Set an invoice due July 18 to send two days early, and your customer gets it July 16 — a small buffer that meaningfully improves on-time payment.

Extra Options That Make a Template Look Professional

Before you activate, a handful of add-ons let you tailor each invoice to your business. You can attach terms and conditions spelling out payment timelines or refund policies, switch on late fees that apply automatically when a customer misses the due date, and pass through processing fees so transaction costs land on the payer rather than your margin. Service businesses can enable tipping to let customers add a gratuity, and you can upload an attachment — a contract, a scope document, anything that should travel with the bill.

One discipline to build in now: lock nothing in until you're sure. While the template is still in Draft, every field is editable. The moment it becomes Active or Scheduled, core details like frequency, price, and taxes are frozen. Double-check those while you still can, because fixing them later means cloning the template and starting a fresh series.

Reading the Status Labels

Recurring templates carry a status that tells you exactly where they sit in their lifecycle and, just as usefully, what you're allowed to do with them. There are five.

A Draft template has been created but not activated — fully editable and deletable, and the right moment for any changes. An Active template is currently generating invoices on schedule; you can't edit or delete it, but you can end it. A Scheduled template is set to begin at a future date, also locked from editing, though you can still delete or end it before the first cycle fires. A Canceled template won't generate anything further but stays visible for reference, and a Completed template has reached its end condition and stopped on its own. Both Canceled and Completed templates can only be deleted if no invoices were ever sent from them — anything with billing history is preserved.

Managing and Reusing Templates

From the Recurring tab inside Payments > Invoices & Estimates, the More Options (⋮) menu beside any template is your control panel. View History opens the full timeline of invoices a template has produced — due dates, amounts, and payment status in one place. Clone duplicates a template so you can launch a similar series without rebuilding it from scratch, and Convert to Template saves an invoice as a reusable starting point for future automation. End stops future billing while keeping the record intact, and Delete removes a template entirely — available only when nothing has been sent.

The One Setting That Actually Stops the Billing

This is the part to read twice, because it's where people get burned. Voiding a single invoice does not stop a recurring series. Void this month's bill and you've canceled exactly one charge — the underlying schedule is still alive and will generate a brand-new invoice next cycle, and the cycle after that. Customers end up billed for a subscription they thought was canceled, and you end up issuing refunds and apologies.

To genuinely shut a series off, you end the schedule itself. Go to Payments > Invoices & Estimates, open the Recurring tab, find the client's active schedule, click the More Options (⋮) menu, and select End. That stops every future invoice while preserving the history of everything already sent. Make this your default mental model: void cancels a charge, End cancels the subscription.

Tracking What's Been Paid

Open any template's Details panel to see every invoice it has generated, each carrying its own status. Sent means delivered, Overdue means it went out but payment is still pending, Paid is self-explanatory, and Not Sent flags a delivery failure that needs a resend. Scanning this view is the fastest way to spot a customer slipping behind before it becomes a collections problem.

Frequently Asked Questions

What's the difference between a recurring invoice and a regular one? A regular invoice is a one-time charge you create and send manually. A recurring invoice is a template that automatically generates and sends new invoices on a schedule. Use a regular invoice for a single payment and a recurring invoice for any ongoing or subscription billing.

Can I pause or change a recurring invoice after setting it up? You can pause or edit a recurring invoice from the Recurring tab — select it and update the schedule or details. Keep in mind that once a template is Active or Scheduled, core fields like frequency and pricing are locked; for those changes you'll clone the template and start a new series.

Will customers get automatic reminders for unpaid invoices? Not by default. The platform doesn't send automatic payment reminders on its own, but you can build an automated workflow with overdue-payment triggers to handle reminders for you.

Can I CC someone else on a recurring invoice? Not within the recurring setup itself. You can set the primary customer as the recipient, but there's currently no native field to CC additional email addresses on each occurrence.

If I add a discount, does it stay forever? It depends on where you add it. A discount applied to a single invoice draft affects only that one payment. A discount applied to the recurring template carries into every future invoice. For a one-time reduction, edit the specific draft, not the template.

Why does my first invoice show both a setup fee and the first charge during a trial? Invoices don't recognize a product's trial period — that setting applies to the subscription, not the invoice. If you add a recurring product with a setup fee, the system bills both immediately. The clean workaround is two invoices: one for the setup fee upfront, noting the trial in the description, and a second for the recurring charge sent after the trial ends.

Recurring invoices reward a few minutes of careful setup with months — or years — of billing that simply runs itself. Get the frequency and end condition right while the template's still in Draft, remember that End is what stops a series, and you've turned your most repetitive financial chore into something you never have to think about again.