Recurring Invoices #

As the name suggests, Recurring Invoices are for automatically creating invoices on a given schedule & limit. If you have a client or customer whom you're regularly billing the same invoice regularly then you can use this feature to automatically create and send the invoices.

Fields: #

A Recurring Invoice is just like a wrapper to create invoices automatically. Thus most of the fields you see here are same as Invoices

Some other additional fields are:

• Limit: By default, its set to "None" where it'll create unlimited invoices until you change the status to COMPLETED or ON_HOLD. Otherwise you can limit the creation by a given count or a date.
• Frequency: By default, its set to Weekly, but you can change to monthly, yearly or provide a custom cron format.

Recurring Invoice Lifecycle #

Below are the different statuses of a recurring invoice:

• ACTIVE: Actively creating invoices according to given schedule and limit.
• ON HOLD: To pause creating invoices.
• COMPLETED: To mark the Recurring Invoice as completed and stop creating invoices.

Custom Frequency (Schedule): #

Crater supports creating recurring invoices based on a custom cron format. When you select Custom Format on Frequency field, you can specify the expression yourself.

A CRON expression is a string representing the schedule for a particular command to execute. The parts of a CRON schedule are as follows:

*    *    *    *    *
-    -    -    -    -
|    |    |    |    |
|    |    |    |    |
|    |    |    |    +----- day of week (0 - 7) (Sunday=0 or 7)
|    |    |    +---------- month (1 - 12)
|    |    +--------------- day of month (1 - 31)
|    +-------------------- hour (0 - 23)
+------------------------- min (0 - 59)

Server Configuration: #

In order for Crater to automatically create Invoices on a given schedule, you will need to configure your server to run the job every minute.

For Docker: #

Crater includes support for cron with docker on version 5.0.0 by default. If you're updating from a previous version, please take a backup of your database + files and re-run docker-compose up.

Other Providers: #

You need to add a single cron configuration entry to the server that runs the schedule:run command every minute.

* * * * * cd /path-to-your-project && php artisan schedule:run >> /dev/null 2>&1

Example command for a shared hosting provider like Godaddy:

 /usr/local/bin/php /home/myuser/public_html/crater/artisan schedule:run >> /dev/null 2>&1

Testing Locally: #

Run the below command if you would like to test recurring invoices on your local machine. (Note: This command does not work on windows)

php artisan schedule:work