Two different things, and the difference confuses people because most shops only ever hand over one of them.
| What it is | |
|---|---|
| The receipt | The slip. Narrow, printed on a thermal roll, made to be read and thrown away. |
| The invoice | The document. A numbered GST invoice, in your books, with the customer on it if there is one. |
The invoice always exists. It is written the moment the sale settles, whether or not anything was printed, whether or not the customer waited. The receipt is a view of it, sized for the paper in the machine.
What the shop controls
| Setting | What it does |
|---|---|
| Heading | Printed at the top. Shop name, address, GSTIN — whatever a customer needs to identify who sold them this. |
| Footer | Printed at the bottom. Return policy, thanks, a note that a GST invoice is available on request. |
| Width | The paper, in millimetres. 80mm is the usual roll, 58mm the small one. Getting it wrong wraps every line. |
| Receipt or invoice by default | Which one the till offers first after a sale. |
| Email it | Not built yet. The setting saves; no receipt is sent. Print or reprint the slip instead. |
Setting the width to match the machine matters more than it sounds. A receipt laid out for 80mm paper coming out of a 58mm printer wraps every line onto two, and a customer is handed a slip twice as long and half as readable.
Reprinting
Every sale in the Sales list carries a receipt icon. A customer who comes back an hour later gets the same slip again, and nothing is re-sold to produce it.
A cashier can reprint their own sales. That is enough to fix the thing that actually happens — a printer that jammed ten minutes ago — without handing them the shop’s whole day to browse.
When the customer wants a proper invoice
Put a customer on the sale. The invoice behind it carries their name, address and GSTIN, and can be printed or emailed like any other invoice in the product — because it is one.
This is where a counter that writes real documents pays for itself. There is no “raise a proper invoice for this counter sale” step, because the proper invoice was what the counter wrote in the first place.
A business on the composition scheme issues a bill of supply instead, and the counter does that by itself. Nobody has to remember, and nobody finds out in April.
Something missing or wrong here? Tell us. A question that needed asking usually means a page that needed writing.