Required Fields lets you decide what has to be captured before an invoice or estimate can be saved. It is how you stop half-finished customer records from piling up, by catching the information while the customer is still standing in front of you.

Go to Settings > Invoicing > Required Fields. Owner or Store Manager only.

The panel is split into two groups, because they gate two different things

About the customer (these live on the customer record, so filling one in fixes that customer for good):

  • Require a customer on every invoice
  • Email
  • Phone
  • Address (street line only)
  • City
  • State
  • ZIP

Each one shows how many of your existing customers are missing it, so you can see what a toggle will cost your counter staff before you switch it on.

About the sale (these are asked for on every invoice)

  • Referred By
  • Any custom invoice fields you have set up under Settings > Custom Fields

First Name and Last Name are always required and cannot be switched off.

Requiring any customer field automatically requires a customer. Without that, the rule would be skipped by simply not attaching a customer to the invoice, which would make every other toggle decorative. If you want to keep taking anonymous walk-in sales, leave the customer fields off; those sales will not be checked.

The check happens when the invoice or estimate is SAVED, not when payment is posted. This is deliberate. Email, phone, and Referred By are lead information, and a check at payment time would only ever collect it from customers who already bought. The customer who takes a quote and walks out is exactly the one whose email is worth the most, so estimates are checked the same way invoices are.

Your customer's payment is never blocked. If an invoice is paid later through Accounts Receivable or a payment link, that payment always goes through regardless of this setting.

What your staff see: if something is missing when they hit Save, a prompt names it and lets them fill it in right there on the invoice, without losing the invoice they just built. Customer details typed into that prompt are saved to the customer record.

Managers can override. An Owner or Store Manager can save without a required field and enter an optional reason. Every override is recorded in Settings > Security > Audit Log, showing who did it, on which invoice, what was missing, and why.

Expect this to bite on day one, and that is the point. If you imported your customers from another system, most of them probably have no email address. The first time each of those customers comes back, the invoice will stop until someone enters it. That is how the gaps get filled: at the counter, at the one moment the customer is there to ask. If you would rather clean up gradually, turn on one field at a time.

Dealer invoices are not affected, since they carry a dealer rather than a customer.

Editing an older invoice will not demand information that was never asked for when it was written. The check only runs when an invoice is created, or when you change which customer is attached to it.