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The invoice carries the handover: delivery packs filed, units released when paid

Three Make scenarios file everything signed at handover (the delivery note, ID, payment proofs, registration document and photos) onto the invoice in the accounting system, with the unit's VIN as its reference. When that invoice is fully paid, a prefilled release form is raised and the branches are emailed so the unit can leave.

Billing & financeFlow2025

Where this applies

Vehicle, trailer and equipment sellers, and any business that hands over a serialised unit and should only let it leave once it is paid for.

router branches per handover, each fail-soft
11
between release checks, in business hours
15 min
runs in the last 30 days
1,926

The problem

Selling a serialised unit produces a pile of paper at handover: a signed delivery note, the buyer's ID, proof of payment, a registration document, photos of the unit. Kept in a form tool, an inbox and a shared drive, it is never in one place when accounts or a branch needs it, and the link between this invoice and that physical unit lives in someone's head.

The other half of the problem is the gate: a unit should leave the yard only once it is paid for. If the branch has to ask accounts each time, units wait, or leave early.

What we built

01

The invoice is the file

When a delivery note is signed, the scenario finds the invoice by number and attaches the whole pack to it: the delivery note itself, the signatory's ID, each payment proof, the registration document and four photos. Accounts and branches then open one invoice and see every document for the sale.

02

The VIN becomes the reference

The unit's VIN from the form is written onto the invoice as its reference. That ties the physical unit to the sale, and it is where the release step later reads the VIN from, so nobody types it twice. The update is skipped for a deleted or voided invoice.

03

A data store bridges two forms

The original request-for-invoice form is attached as well. The delivery note doesn't know which entry that was; a data store keyed by invoice id, written when the invoice was raised, resolves it. Photos are named by the first line item's product code, taken by iterating the lines and keeping only the first, without an aggregator.

04

Retry the lookup, fail soft per document

Runs are processed one at a time. The invoice lookup and a fresh read of the form entry, which renews its file links, each retry up to three times a minute apart, and a run that still fails is kept for resuming rather than lost. After that, an eleven-way router gives each document its own branch with its own ignore handler, so one bad file never blocks the VIN or the other attachments. A companion scenario runs the same steps, photos included, when a signed note is edited, so documents that arrive later still reach the invoice; it checks each file exists before uploading.

05

Paid is the trigger for release

Every fifteen minutes in business hours, the release scenario watches invoices and passes only those with nothing left to pay, which catches full payment whether it arrived in one payment or several. It looks the invoice up in a data store first: the first time, it creates a release form prefilled with invoice number, VIN and customer, records the mapping and emails the invoice and form to the sales and branch mailboxes; after that, it updates the existing form instead of creating a second.

The outcome

  • In Make's counters for the last 30 days: 1,926 runs and 4,751 operations across the three scenarios. The release watch accounts for 1,826 runs, most of them one-operation polls that find nothing newly paid.

  • The delivery-note scenario ran 88 times in that window, a typical run filing a full pack in 32 to 37 operations. It recorded 20 errors: thirteen were the accounting system's rate limit, on one morning when a backlog of submissions was released at once; six were expired file links; one was a dropped connection. The edit companion ran 12 times without error, and the release watch hit the rate limit once on the same morning. Both delivery-note scenarios were then changed to process runs one at a time, retry the lookup and renew file links before downloading, and the edit companion gained the photo branches.

Where it stops

This flow starts from an invoice that already exists; raising it from the quote is an earlier step and is not described here. Runs that fail after their retries are kept, but resuming them is a manual step. The ignore handlers keep a run going but also mean a rejected upload is not reported, and processing an entry twice, or editing it, attaches its documents again. A later change to a paid invoice sends the release email again. The email recipients are fixed in the scenario.

Built with

  • Make.com
  • Cognito Forms
  • Xero
  • Gmail
  • Make data store

Patterns used

  • Invoice as the document store
  • Data store as a bridge
  • Retry, then fail soft
  • Watch for amount due zero

Page copy drafted with AI assistance. Skofi is accountable for it. Editorial policy

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