GST invoices built from the posts you delivered

Most creators we talk to are not slow at invoicing because they are disorganised. They are slow because the invoice lives somewhere else: a spreadsheet, a template a friend sent, a reminder that gets pushed to next week while the work carries on.

Invoices in Instoly sit beside the posts, so raising one is a job for the end of the campaign rather than a separate afternoon. Here is what that looks like, and what it costs.

What do you set once?

Three things, in Settings: your invoice prefix, your GSTIN and your default currency. Every invoice you raise afterwards inherits them, so the details you would otherwise retype into a template are already on the document.

We would do this before the first invoice rather than during it. Fixing a prefix halfway through a financial year is the kind of small mess that is easy to avoid and annoying to unpick.

How does an invoice get built from posts?

You build it from what you delivered. The posts you published for that brand are already in Instoly, so we assemble the invoice from the work rather than from your memory of it, which is where most of the errors in a hand-typed invoice begin.

What goes wrong with a hand-typed invoice?

The same four things, over and over, and every one of them delays payment rather than losing it outright. We built the invoice side around avoiding them rather than around looking impressive.

• A number that repeats or skips. Copying last month's file and editing it is how two invoices end up sharing a number, and a finance team will send both back.
• A missing or mistyped GSTIN, which is the single most common reason an invoice is returned rather than paid.
• No record of what was delivered. A line that says "Instagram campaign" invites a question, and a question adds a week.
• The wrong currency on a deal agreed in another one, which nobody notices until the payment arrives short.

None of these is difficult. They are just the kind of mistake anybody makes at eleven at night, at the end of a campaign, in a template that was built for somebody else's business.

What does the brand actually receive?

A PDF, or a shareable link, or both. The link matters more than it sounds: a marketing manager forwarding your invoice to their accounts team can pass on a link that always shows the current version, instead of an attachment that gets detached from the email thread.

We would send the PDF to the person you dealt with and keep the link for the chase-up, because chasing with a link is easier than asking whether an attachment arrived.

What does an invoice cost?

One invoice credit each, and invoice credits are their own allowance, separate from the DM credits your flows spend. The free plan includes 20 a month, Pro 50 and Business 200, and you can top up.

Twenty a month is more brand deals than most creators sign, so for a lot of people this part of the product never costs anything. That is deliberate on our side: we would rather invoicing be the thing that keeps you in the app than the thing we charge you for. The separate allowances are set out in the free plan and how credits work.

Why is this in the same app as the DMs?

Because it is the same job. A brand finds you, the campaign runs, comments arrive and get answered, and then somebody has to be paid for it. Splitting that across three tools is how the last step gets forgotten.

There is one more reason we keep it here. The people we built this for are running a business out of a phone between shoots, and every extra tool is another password, another subscription and another place to forget something. Fewer places to look is a feature, even when it is not the one on the homepage.

There is a practical benefit too. When the brand asks what the campaign actually did, our numbers sit in the same place as the invoice, and a creator who can answer that in one message gets asked back.

The invoice is part of the work, not the admin that happens after it.

Getting paid is the least glamorous thing Instoly does and one of the reasons people stay, because the deal is not finished when the post goes up.