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Finance in the sidebar covers the whole studio, not one project. It opens on Dashboard. The current tabs, in order, are Dashboard, Proposals, Invoices, Change Orders, Purchase Orders and Retainers. Vendor Quotes has moved to Project → Documents. Record and review received vendor quotes there; purchase orders remain in Finance.

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The four numbers

Switch the period with This month · This quarter · This year · All time. The cards use invoice issue dates, not payment dates. The default is All time. An invoice without an issue date is included regardless of the selected period. Outstanding and Overdue overlap; do not add them together. Total invoiced also includes drafts, so it is not a sent-invoices-only total. Review the invoice list when reconciling these figures.

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Needs attention

Below the cards, Atelier lists overdue and partially paid invoices — the ones that need follow-up. This list covers all invoices and is not narrowed by the cards’ period selector. Open an item to inspect its balance and recorded payments. When Pending payment milestones appears, review the proposal milestone and choose Create invoice to create its draft, or View invoice when one already exists. A milestone needs a linked project before an invoice can be created.

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The other tabs

  • Proposals — What you send before the work is agreed.
  • Invoices — Created from a schedule or from scratch, sent, tracked and marked paid.
  • Change orders — Scope changes after the proposal is signed, documented and priced.
  • Purchase orders — What you send vendors. Carries your studio details and the project ship-to address.
  • Retainers — Client deposits received, amounts applied to invoices, and the remaining balance for each project.

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How documents reach people

Atelier does not send email. Mark as sent changes a document’s status — it does not deliver anything. For a proposal or change order, copy the client link and send it yourself. On a draft invoice, Send & copy link marks it sent and copies the link; it does not email it. The action reads Copy link once the invoice is issued. A purchase order has no client-facing link at all — Download PDF is the only way to get it out.
The one exception is your account’s own sign-in and studio-invitation emails, sent by Clerk, Atelier’s authentication provider — not by anything in Finance.

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Document actions

Open the document to see its available actions. Workflow status changes do not record money received. For invoices, payment states follow recorded payments and applied retainers; Record payment logs a payment. AI finance editing remains limited to drafts.

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Before you send anything

Client documents pull from Settings → Studio: your logo, legal name, business address, tax ID, currency, date format, and the payment block in the invoice footer. Set those up once.
Invoices are usually created from a schedule rather than here, on the schedule’s Financials view, so the line items and totals carry across with markup and tax already applied.

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Work with AI

Read finance records and prepare drafts with AI explains supported actions, example requests and what to check after an edit.