Invoices and receipts
Every payment produces a receipt and most produce an invoice, as proper PDFs emailed to you and kept in your billing area. This explains the difference between the two, which events produce which, and what to do if you need one changed.
Open Lance produces two kinds of document, and they are not the same thing. Both arrive as PDFs by email and both are kept in your billing area, where you can download them again at any point.
Invoice or receipt
An invoice states what was owed and what it was for. It carries the line items, the period covered, the contract or order reference, and the totals. This is the document an accountant wants, and the one you attach to an expense claim.
A receipt states what left the card. One figure, what it covered, and how it was paid. This is the document you match against a bank statement months later when you are trying to work out what a line on it was.
You often get both for the same transaction, because they answer different questions.
What produces what
Funding escrow produces a receipt. A charge went to your card; here is the record.
Buying a Drop-In produces both. An invoice describing the package you bought, and a receipt for the payment.
Each approved week on an hourly contract produces an invoice. It lists the days, the hours approved against each, the rate, and the fee — so a month of hourly work gives you four documents that add up rather than one lump you cannot break down.
Each month of a Dedicated Hire produces an invoice for that month.
Bid packs and subscriptions produce both. These are purchases from Open Lance rather than payments to a freelancer, so they are ordinary commercial documents with our company details on them, which is what you need to claim them as a business expense.
Where to find them
Both clients and freelancers have them under Billing in their dashboard, listed newest first, with the document number, what it was for, the date and the amount.
Two buttons on each: view, which opens the PDF, and download, which saves it. The file is named by its document number, so a folder of them sorts sensibly rather than being a pile of files with identical names.
They are also emailed to you when they are raised, attached to the message rather than behind a link. That is deliberate: an invoice you have to log in to fetch is an invoice your accountant cannot open.
What is on them
The issuing company details, your details as we hold them, a unique document number, the date, the line items, and the totals.
If you paid in a currency other than US dollars, the document is written in the currency you were actually charged in, with the dollar equivalent and the rate stated. This matters for bookkeeping: your bank statement will show the local amount, and a document in dollars would not reconcile against it.
Document numbers
Every document carries a unique number in a sequence, without gaps. It never changes and is never reused. Quote it if you ever need to ask about a specific payment — it turns a search into a lookup.
Getting your own details right
The name and address on an invoice come from your account. If you need a company name on your invoices, set it on your profile before you make the purchase, not after.
This matters more than it sounds. A document is frozen at the moment it is raised: it records what was true then, deliberately, so a historical invoice cannot silently change years later. Updating your profile changes future documents and leaves existing ones as they were issued.
If you have already been charged and the details are wrong, open a support ticket with the document number and explain what needs to change. It can be dealt with properly rather than by editing history.
Tax
Open Lance issues documents recording what was charged. It does not give tax advice and cannot tell you how to treat a payment in your jurisdiction.
Two things that come up often:
Freelancers are independent, not employees. Open Lance does not withhold income tax and does not issue employment documents. Your earnings history and the invoices for anything you bought from us are available for your own accounting, but what you owe and where is between you and your tax authority.
Clients get invoices carrying the issuing company's registration details, which is normally what a finance department needs. If yours requires something specific that is not on the document, ask through support — it is usually possible.
If a document is missing
Documents are raised when a payment settles, so allow a few minutes after a transaction.
If something is genuinely absent, check first whether the payment was actually taken — a checkout you started but did not complete produces nothing, because nothing was charged. Your wallet history or your card statement will tell you.
If money moved and no document exists, that is worth a ticket. Include the date, the amount and the contract or order it relates to.
Note that a payment made entirely from your wallet balance does not always produce a separate receipt, because nothing new left your card: the money was already yours and was receipted when you first loaded it. The transaction still appears in your wallet history.
For freelancers
Two different things get confused here, so it is worth separating them.
Things you buy from Open Lance — bid packs, an Ultra subscription — produce an invoice and a receipt in your name, carrying our company details. These are ordinary business purchases and they are exactly what you need to claim them as a business expense.
Money you earn does not produce an invoice from us to you, because we are not billing you for it. Your earnings are recorded in your earnings ledger, which shows every release with the gross amount, the commission deducted and the net credited, plus every withdrawal.
If a client asks you for an invoice for your work, note that the platform documents record the transaction from Open Lance's side. Many freelancers issue their own invoice to the client for their records as well, which is entirely normal and is between you and them.
Your earnings ledger is the authoritative record of what you were paid and when, and it is what an accountant will want.
Reconciling against a bank statement
The most common reason someone opens a document is to work out what a line on their statement was.
Receipts are designed for this. They carry the date, the amount in the currency actually charged, the last digits of the card, and the reference. Matching one against a statement line should take seconds.
If a statement line does not match anything, check in this order: whether it was an automatic charge you had forgotten was recurring, such as an hourly weekly refill or a subscription renewal; whether it was the small card verification charge, which is credited back to your wallet; and whether your bank has applied its own fee alongside the charge, which is theirs rather than ours.
If it still does not reconcile, a ticket with the statement line and the date will resolve it.
Retention
Documents are kept and remain downloadable. They are not purged after a period, because the whole point of a numbered, sequential document series is that it can be produced years later.
If your account is closed, ask for what you need before closure completes rather than after.
If you need something the document does not show
Occasionally a finance department asks for something specific — a purchase order reference, a particular tax identifier, a different address format.
Ask through support with the document number and what is needed. It is usually possible, and it is better handled properly than by editing a PDF yourself, which produces a document that does not match our records and will not survive scrutiny.
What cannot be done is changing a document to say something that was not true when it was raised. A document is a record of a transaction, not a template.
Documents and multiple currencies
If your currency changed between two purchases, your documents will be in different currencies, each recording what was actually charged at that time.
This is correct rather than inconsistent, and it is what makes each one reconcile against the corresponding bank statement line. An accountant will convert them at whatever rate their process uses; a document silently re-denominated to a single currency would be worse than useless, because it would not match anything.
The short version
Every payment produces a receipt. Hiring and buying produce invoices. Both arrive by email as PDFs and stay downloadable in your billing area indefinitely, numbered in a gapless sequence.
Set your company details before you buy rather than after, because a document records what was true when it was raised and does not change afterwards.
Common questions
Can I get an invoice for a payment made months ago? Yes. Documents remain downloadable indefinitely from your billing area.
Can the company name be changed on an invoice already issued? Not by editing it. Open a ticket with the document number and it will be handled properly.
Do freelancers get an invoice for money they earned? No, because we are not billing you for it. Your earnings ledger is the record. Things you buy from Open Lance do produce invoices.
Is there a monthly statement? Each transaction produces its own document rather than a monthly roll-up, which is what reconciles against a bank statement line by line.
Related
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