Invoice by Invoiced: The Complete Guide

If you have searched for "invoice by Invoiced", you are almost certainly looking at Invoiced, an accounts-receivable and invoice-to-cash automation platform. It helps businesses that sell get paid faster by automating invoicing, reminders, collections and online customer payments. That is the sell side of the ledger. This guide explains what the software does, who it suits, and how it differs from the buy side, where procurement and supplier payments live.

What people mean by "invoice by Invoiced"

Invoiced is a software company that builds tools for the finance function, and its core product line sits in accounts receivable, sometimes described as invoice-to-cash automation. When people type "invoice by Invoiced" into a search box, they are usually trying to find its invoicing capability: the part of the platform that creates, sends and tracks the bills a business issues to its customers.

It helps to separate the everyday word from the brand. An invoice is simply the document a seller sends a buyer to request payment for goods or services delivered. Invoiced, the company, wraps that document in automation so the seller spends less time chasing money. So the phrase blends a generic term with a specific vendor, which is why it can be confusing at first glance.

Throughout this guide we treat Invoiced fairly as what it is: a well-regarded platform for the receivable side of finance. We are not here to rank it or to pick holes in it, but to explain the category it belongs to and, just as importantly, the very different category that sits opposite it.

That distinction is the reason this guide exists. Many people arrive at a search like "invoice by Invoiced" without a firm sense of whether they need software to help them collect from customers or software to help them pay suppliers. Both jobs involve invoices, both live in the finance team, and both are often lumped together in casual conversation. Yet they call for genuinely different tools, and picking the wrong one is a common and expensive mistake. By the end you should know exactly which side of the ledger your problem sits on and what kind of platform solves it.

What accounts-receivable automation actually does

Accounts-receivable automation is about collecting money owed to you with as little manual effort as possible. A finance team without it lives in spreadsheets and email threads, manually raising invoices, remembering who has not paid, and drafting the same polite reminder over and over. AR software takes that grind and turns it into a repeatable, largely hands-off process.

The typical capabilities of a platform in this space, Invoiced included, cluster around a few jobs:

• Automated invoicing. Generate and send invoices on a schedule or when a trigger fires, rather than raising each one by hand.
• Payment reminders. Send timed, escalating reminders to customers before and after the due date without anyone remembering to hit send.
• Collections workflows. Route overdue accounts through a structured chase process so nothing slips through the cracks.
• Customer payment portals. Give customers a self-service page where they can view what they owe and pay online, which shortens the time to cash.
• Cash application. Match incoming payments back to the right invoices so the ledger stays clean.

The payoff is measured in days. When invoices go out on time, reminders fire automatically and paying is a single click, customers tend to pay sooner. That pulls down the average time it takes to collect, which frees up cash the business would otherwise have tied up in unpaid bills.

There is a softer benefit too. Chasing late payment is awkward work, and when it is done by hand it is easy to be inconsistent: some customers get chased hard, others slip through, and the tone varies with whoever happens to send the email. Automating the sequence makes the process even-handed and professional. Every customer gets the same courteous, timely reminders, which protects the relationship while still getting the invoice paid. Good AR software is as much about consistency as it is about speed.

Who accounts-receivable software suits

AR automation earns its keep when a business issues a meaningful volume of invoices and feels the pain of slow payment. A subscription business billing hundreds of customers every month, a wholesaler with long payment terms, or any company where the finance team spends real hours chasing overdue accounts is a natural fit.

It matters less when invoicing is occasional or the customer base is tiny. If you send a handful of invoices a month and everyone pays promptly, a basic accounting package will cover you and dedicated AR software would be overkill. The value scales with volume, with the length of your payment terms, and with how much late payment currently costs you in chasing time and strained cash flow.

The honest test is simple. Look at how many hours your team spends each week producing invoices and following up on unpaid ones, and look at your average days to collect. If both numbers are high, a platform like Invoiced is likely to pay for itself. If both are low, your money is better spent elsewhere.

Industry also matters. Businesses that bill on subscriptions or usage, that offer credit terms, or that manage many recurring contracts tend to get the most out of AR automation, because their invoicing is both high in volume and highly repetitive. Firms that invoice on one-off projects with bespoke terms still benefit, but the gains are smaller because more of each invoice needs a human eye. As always, the tool should follow the shape of the problem rather than the other way round.

The crucial distinction: receivable versus payable

Here is the single most important idea in this guide, and the one that most cleanly explains where a tool like Invoiced fits and where it does not. Accounts payable and accounts receivable are mirror images of each other, and no single tool naturally does both well.

Read that table slowly, because it is easy to blur the two when both involve a document called an invoice. The same piece of paper is a receivable to the seller and a payable to the buyer. Which side you are on decides which kind of software you need. Invoiced lives firmly on the receivable side; it is built to help the seller collect.

The reason this matters is that businesses routinely buy the wrong tool for the problem they actually have. A company drowning in supplier invoices and slow internal approvals will not be helped by a platform designed to chase its own customers. It needs the opposite: a buy-side system.

The confusion is understandable, because the vocabulary overlaps. Both sides talk about invoices, both sit inside finance, and both are sometimes described loosely as "invoicing software". But the underlying goals point in opposite directions. Receivables is about persuading someone else to release cash to you as quickly as possible. Payables is about releasing your own cash carefully, only for things that were genuinely ordered, received and priced correctly. Speed helps one; control matters more for the other. A single product optimised for one goal will inevitably be a compromise on the other.

The buy side: procurement and accounts payable

The buy side is everything that happens when your business spends money with suppliers. It starts long before an invoice arrives, with someone raising a request to buy something, getting it approved, choosing a supplier and issuing a purchase order. The invoice comes at the end, and paying it correctly depends on all the steps that led up to it.

This is the domain of procurement and accounts payable, and it has its own distinct set of headaches. Instead of chasing customers, the buy-side worry is controlling spend: making sure purchases are authorised before they happen, that the price and quantity on the supplier invoice match what was actually ordered and received, and that nobody is quietly buying outside the agreed process.

Handling supplier bills well is a discipline in its own right, and it is worth understanding the mechanics of invoice processing before you decide how to automate it. Increasingly the documents themselves are structured data rather than PDFs, which is where electronic invoicing comes in. Both of these belong to the buy side, and neither is what an AR platform is built to do.

Where ProcureWave fits

ProcureWave is a buy-side platform. Where Invoiced helps a business get paid, ProcureWave helps a business buy well and pay its suppliers accurately. The two are complementary, not competitive; a finance function could happily run Invoiced for its receivables and ProcureWave for its payables at the same time, each doing the job it is designed for.

On the buy side, ProcureWave covers the parts of the process that decide whether spending is controlled or chaotic:

The goal on this side of the ledger is not speed of collection but accuracy and control of payment. A good buy-side platform stops you paying for things nobody approved, catches invoices that do not match the order, and gives finance a clean, auditable trail from request through to settlement.

That control compounds over time. When every purchase runs through an approval path and every supplier invoice is checked against a purchase order and a goods-received record, the business builds a reliable picture of what it is committed to spend before the money leaves. Finance can forecast with confidence, audits become straightforward, and the quiet drift of unapproved or duplicate spending simply has fewer places to hide. None of this is what an accounts-receivable tool is designed to deliver, which is precisely why the two categories exist side by side rather than as one.

How both sides work together

A healthy business manages both sides of its cash at once. Money flows in from customers and out to suppliers, and the finance team's job is to keep both flows orderly. Automating only one side leaves the other as a manual bottleneck, so the mature answer is usually to have the right tool for each.

Think of it as two halves of a whole. Electronic invoicing standards increasingly connect the two, because the electronic invoice one company sends as a receivable is the same document its customer receives as a payable. When both parties automate, the invoice can travel from seller to buyer as clean structured data with no re-keying at either end.

That is the practical case for treating AR and AP as separate but linked disciplines. A tool like Invoiced makes your outbound invoices efficient; a platform like ProcureWave makes your inbound spend controlled. Neither replaces the other, and a business that runs both well has closed the loop on its cash.

It is worth picturing the full cycle. Your supplier raises an invoice, which is a receivable to them and a payable to you. On their side an AR platform sends it, tracks it and nudges you to pay. On your side a buy-side platform receives it, matches it to your order, routes it for approval and settles it. When both ends are automated the invoice moves cleanly from one system to the other, and two finance teams that never speak still transact smoothly. That is the quiet ideal that modern electronic invoicing is steadily making normal.

Choosing the right tool for your problem

Start by naming the pain honestly, because the fix follows directly from it. If your problem is that customers pay you late and your team burns hours chasing them, you have a receivables problem, and software such as Invoiced is the category to explore. If your problem is uncontrolled spend, slow approvals or supplier invoices that do not match your orders, you have a buy-side problem, and a procurement platform is the answer.

Be wary of trying to force one tool to do both. AR platforms and procurement platforms are built around opposite goals, and a product that is excellent at chasing your customers will be a poor fit for controlling how your business buys. The strength of each comes precisely from its focus.

It also helps to think about sequence and scale. A small business often feels the receivables pinch first, because late-paying customers hit cash flow directly and visibly. As the business grows and its own buying becomes more complex, the buy side starts to matter just as much, because uncontrolled spend and messy supplier invoices quietly erode margin. Many companies end up adopting a receivables tool and a procurement tool at different stages of their growth, and that is perfectly sensible. There is no rule that says you must solve both at once; solve the one that is costing you most today, then come back for the other when it earns a place on the list.

If the buy side is where your money is leaking, that is exactly what ProcureWave is for. You can see how approvals, purchase orders and supplier invoice matching fit together on the ProcureWave platform, and when you want to talk through your own process, you can get in touch for a walkthrough. There is no pressure; the point is to match the tool to the problem, whichever side of the ledger it sits on.

Frequently asked questions

What is Invoiced?

Invoiced is an accounts-receivable and invoice-to-cash automation platform. It helps a business that sells goods or services get paid faster by automating invoicing, sending payment reminders, running collections workflows and offering customers an online portal to pay. In short, it works on the sell side, the money your customers owe you.

Is "Invoice by Invoiced" a specific product?

Not really. People searching for "Invoice by Invoiced" are usually looking for the invoicing and accounts-receivable capabilities offered by the software company Invoiced. It is best understood as invoicing within an AR automation platform rather than a standalone product with that exact name.

What is the difference between accounts receivable and accounts payable?

Accounts receivable is money your customers owe you for what you have sold; accounts payable is money you owe your suppliers for what you have bought. Tools like Invoiced serve the receivable side, while buy-side invoice handling and procurement belong to the payable side.

Does ProcureWave compete with Invoiced?

No. They sit on opposite sides of the ledger and complement each other. Invoiced helps you collect from customers; ProcureWave helps you source suppliers, approve spend and manage the invoices you receive so you pay accurately and on time.

Which side of the ledger should I automate first?

Automate the side where cash is leaking. If late-paying customers strain your cash flow, start with receivables. If maverick spend, slow approvals or invoice errors are the problem, start with the buy side and procurement automation.