How Finance fits together

Every project gets its own Finance budget, and everything in this section happens against that one budget, in one direction:

1. Catalog — you define what you sell and what it costs, so an invoice line reports as more than free text.
2. Line items — on the project's Finance page, you add a line typed Receivable (money coming in) or Payable (money going out) and attach one or more people or companies to it. Splitting a line across several entities bills — or pays — each of them separately, at their own amount.
3. Invoices — a receivable goes through approval, then Send Invoice, and Stripe emails each attached entity their own invoice. See Invoices in this section for the approval steps.
4. Payments — the customer pays, through Stripe; GIG never sees or stores a card number.
5. Payouts and disbursements — Stripe moves the money it has collected to your bank on its own schedule (a payout); paying the people who did the work is your own decision and your own record (a disbursement).
6. Reports — what all of it added up to, across sales items, customers and memberships.

Finance → Dashboard is the summary view across all of it, and it is also where a Stripe Connect attempt lands once it finishes.

Why you can't just remove someone from an invoiced line item

Once an entity attached to a line item has a live Stripe invoice, GIG won't let you detach them from it — the row shows an Invoiced badge in place of the remove button. Deleting that attachment wouldn't cancel the invoice: it would stay live at Stripe with the payer still owing it, and the app would lose the only record of who it was for. To remove someone in that state, void their invoice at Stripe first — refunding it is not enough, because a refunded invoice still counts as live until it is voided.

Every amount includes tax

Finance states money one way everywhere: with tax. A line's amount, the budget's cards, the Dashboard, the Lead Desk, Disbursements, the reports and the page a client or payee approves all show what will actually be billed or paid, tax included — the same figure the invoice PDF, Aging and the CSV export give. Where a line carries tax, the amount says how much of it is tax underneath (for example, "incl. $130.00 HST").

A budget's total and its status

Total budget is the ceiling the budget's burn meter measures against. The owner, an admin or the budget's Project Lead sets it from the budget page, or from the budget's settings on the Budgets board; like everything else it includes tax. Leave it at $0 for no ceiling: Remaining is then what the income paid in leaves after expenses.

A budget's Status changes what can happen on it:

• Active — open for new line items and changes.
• Closed — no new line items. Everything already on the budget carries on, so approvals, invoices and payouts in progress are not stranded.
• Archived — read-only: no line item or payee can be added, changed or removed, and on the Budgets board the budget leaves its folder for an Archived group at the bottom. Set it back to Active to change it.

What sits alongside the flow

Memberships are a recurring charge rather than a one-off invoice. Disputes are a customer's bank, not Stripe or GIG, deciding a charge should not have happened. Finance access is granted separately from being an org admin, per person and optionally per budget — an admin without it can't open Finance. It also decides who sees pay on people's profiles in Entity; see Who can see Finance in this section.