Invoice Generator from Shipped Orders

The problem this kills

Invoices that lag shipments are quiet cash leaks. An order ships on Tuesday, the paperwork sits in someone's inbox, and the invoice doesn't go out until the following week - or never goes out at all because nobody noticed the shipment closed. Partial shipments make it worse: you ship 6 of 10 units, but the invoice gets cut for all 10 (an angry customer) or gets skipped entirely until "the rest ships" (cash you never collect).

Most billing teams are stitching this together by hand - eyeballing a shipment report, retyping line items into the accounting system, manually pulling terms and tax off the order, and praying nobody bills the same shipment twice. It's slow, it's error-prone, and it directly delays the money coming in.

This tool closes that gap. It reads what actually shipped, drafts a correct invoice for exactly those quantities, and won't let anything go out the door until a human in billing approves it.

What you'll build

A small, private web app - just for your team - that:

• Imports shipped orders from a CSV or Google Sheet (with pricing and terms), or from your system's export.
• Generates a draft invoice per shipment, billing only the quantities that actually shipped and carrying the order's payment terms and tax straight through.
• Handles partial shipments correctly - ship 6 of 10 today, bill for 6 today; the remaining 4 invoice when they ship.
• Routes every draft to billing for approval - nothing is issued until a person reviews and signs off.
• Issues the invoice on approval: a clean PDF, an email to the customer via Resend, and an AR-ready CSV in the exact columns your accounting system expects.
• Refuses to double-bill - each shipment ID maps to exactly one invoice, guaranteed.
• Keeps a full audit trail - who imported, who approved, what was sent, and when.

What's inside the Implementation Plan

A complete, paste-and-go runbook written for a non-coder. You copy the whole thing into an AI coding agent (Claude Code), answer a few questions, and it builds the tool with you step by step.

• It opens by interviewing you about your business - your current billing process, the systems and spreadsheets you use, the exact field names and SKU/order-number conventions in your data, your typical and peak invoice volumes, your terms and tax rules, and your messy edge cases. It reads back a short tailored spec and waits for your thumbs-up. The result is a tool shaped to how you actually bill, not a generic template.
• Clear, ready-to-paste prompts for every build step.
• A data model and validations tuned to your answers (your terms, your tax handling, your partial-shipment rules).
• A built-in "No API yet?" fallback so you can build the entire tool today using a CSV or Google Sheet - no integration to your ERP required - and export a clean CSV your accounting system can ingest.
• A verification checklist so you know it actually works before you trust it with real money.

The governance it includes (this is the point)

This isn't a script that fires invoices into the void. Governance is baked in from the first build step:

• Login so only your team can open the tool.
• Row-level security so each person only ever sees their own organization's data.
• A hard human-in-the-loop approval gate - the AI drafts the invoice, billing reviews and approves, and only then is it issued and sent. Nothing touches the customer or your books without a human OK.
• Duplicate guards - one shipment ID can only ever produce one invoice, so the same shipment can't be billed twice.
• A complete audit trail - who imported the shipments, who approved each invoice, what was emailed, and exactly when.

Who it's for

AR clerks, billing staff, and controllers who are tired of invoices trailing shipments, of partial shipments getting mis-billed, and of chasing cash that should already be collected. If you can fill in a spreadsheet, you can build this.

You've got this - paste the first prompt and let the plan interview you.