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Smart Invoice

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Smart Invoice enables clients and service providers to transact with fewer intermediaries. Think ‘smart contracts for invoicing’.

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Founder(s):  
This post was written by 
Werlda Hert
and edited by 
Frank Martinez
 & 

Overview

What is it?

Smart Invoice is a sophisticated invoicing tool that handles payments between organizations (which are also called “clients”), and freelancers (which are also called “providers”). Smart Invoice establishes a set of shared expectations between a client and a service provider who are engaged in business with one another.

What problem does it solve?

Smart Invoice solves the “Invoice Dilemma” problem: how do you ensure that you are paid for the work you do, while simultaneously ensuring that your clients receive the value they’re paying for?

How does it work?

Smart Invoice leverages smart contracts built on Ethereum to create a framework by which service providers can rapidly create invoices and deploy them to the xDai sidechain.

After the provider has setup the Smart Invoice, the client can deposit their payments to Smart Invoice at the completion of agreed upon work milestones. Milestones allow payment to be released by the client as work is completed by the service provider.

Smart Invoice includes the following functionality:

  • Each Smart Invoice is its own smart contract executed on the xDai side-chain
  • The client can make regular deposits of WETH (wrapped ETH), to the provider’s Smart Invoice wallet address, by work milestone
  • The client’s deposits can be of varying amounts and come from any wallet address
  • Custom arbitration can be set to use LexDAO, or any Ethereum address

How do I use it?

DAO Masters Insights

Why it's cool:

Smart Invoice replaces the friction of the old invoicing system (the inherent mistrust and emotional involvement associated with payment decisions), with a trustless system based on code, and agreed upon (in a Project Agreement) by both payer and payee.

Challenges:

Since Smart Invoices (like smart contracts) are executed on-chain, when deployed they become immutable. Great care should be taken to enter the correct and exact invoice data during smart invoice creation. Double and triple check your invoice entries, then have someone else double and triple check the entries!

A cautionary comment from Raid Guild about Smart Invoice:

“The contracts Smart Invoice uses are thoroughly tested, but not audited. Raid Guild does not own the contracts created by [Smart Contract], and does not control the money stored in them. Use at your own risk”.

Words of advice:

Join the Raid Guild Discord server (link above) for technical support. Raid Guild built Smart Invoice for themselves, then realized its broader business application, and released it “into the wild”—which means it’s a relatively new, and as of yet, largely untested tool.

Since these invoices are deployed on the Ethereum blockchain; expect high gas fees when creating them—$243 when this tool was tested.

Expected future updates:

  • Better in-app tools to support the arbitration process
  • Private data sharing/storage between client and provider
  • More arbitration providers (Kleros Court, Aragon Court, 1Hive’s Celeste, etc.)
  • Streaming payments (via Superfluid)
  • Escrowed funds earning DeFi yield
  • Support for multiple networks (currently only Ethereum, xDai & Rinkeby Testnet)
  • The ability to change the total invoice or milestone amounts
  • Tokenized invoices

Getting Started

You need an Ethereum wallet (Metamask or WalletConnect) to create a smart invoice at https://smartinvoice.xyz/> CREATE A NEW SMART INVOICE. Creating a smart invoice is a quick process but, as noted above, pay extra attention to the information entered into the, approximately six or seven, smart invoice data input screens.

  • Creator’s Web: https://www.raidguild.org/
  • User Guide: https://docs.smartinvoice.xyz/docs/introducing-smart-invoice
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