Searching

The search bar at the top of every SolidInvoice page is a single entry point for finding any record across your account — clients, contacts, invoices, recurring invoices, quotes, and payments. Type a few characters, and matching records group by type in a dropdown. Hit ↵ (or click a row) to jump straight to a record.

You can focus the search bar from anywhere with the keyboard shortcut Ctrl+K (or Cmd+K on macOS), and there's a ? icon at the right edge of the bar that opens a quick syntax reference modal.

Hosted vs self-hosted

Search is always available on the hosted SolidInvoice plan — there's nothing to set up.

If you're self-hosting, search is optional and needs to be enabled by configuring a search engine. See the Meilisearch integration for the setup steps. Without it, the search bar is hidden and the rest of SolidInvoice runs normally.

What's searchable

The search bar covers six record types, scoped to the company you're currently working in:

• Clients — by name, website.
• Contacts — by name and email.
• Invoices — by number, client name, status, total.
• Recurring invoices — same fields as invoices.
• Quotes — by number, client name, status, total.
• Payments — by reference, client name, status, total.

Results from other companies you belong to are never shown — switch companies first if you need to find a record on another account.

Free-text search

Plain words like acme or invoice 1024 do a fuzzy, typo-tolerant match across all six record types. A few practical notes:

• Multiple words are AND-matched within a record type — klein 5000 shows clients/invoices/etc. that match both terms.
• Typos and partial matches are handled — klien will still find Klein-Lehner.
• Quotes around a phrase force an exact-phrase match — "Acme Corp" won't match Acme Holdings.
• The search runs as you type, with a short debounce. Results refresh on every keystroke.

Qualifiers

Beyond plain text, the search bar understands a small qualifier syntax — similar to GitHub's search — that maps to filters on each record type. Qualifiers have the form key:value and can be combined with free-text terms.

Qualifier	What it does	Example
in:	Limit results to one or more record types: clients, contacts, invoices, recurring_invoices, quotes, payments.	in:invoices,quotes overdue
status:	Filter by status (e.g. paid, pending, draft, overdue).	status:paid acme
client:	Filter by client name. Use quotes for multi-word names.	client:"Acme Corp"
amount:	Filter by total amount.	amount:1000
created:	Filter by creation date.	created:2026-01-15
sort:	Sort the results. Accepts amount, amount_desc, date, date_desc.	unpaid sort:amount_desc

Qualifiers that don't apply to a given record type are silently ignored for it. For example, client:Acme filters invoices, quotes, payments, and recurring invoices, but has no effect on the contacts results — there, client:Acme falls through and is treated as part of the free-text query instead.

A few worked examples:

in:invoices status:overdue sort:date_desc
client:"Acme Corp" amount:5000
in:clients,contacts john

The first finds the most recently created overdue invoices. The second finds anything (across all types) for the client Acme Corp with a total of 5000. The third searches only the clients and contacts indexes for john.

Real-time updates

When you create, edit, or delete records — through the UI, the API, or any integration — search updates immediately. There's no scheduled re-index and nothing to refresh; a record you just created is searchable on the very next keystroke.

If results ever look out of sync (for example, after a database restore on a self-hosted instance), the search engine indexes can be rebuilt — see Meilisearch integration → Initial indexing.

Troubleshooting

The search bar isn't visible

This means the search engine isn't configured for your installation. On the hosted plan this shouldn't happen — contact support if you're on the hosted plan and the search bar is missing. On a self-hosted instance, follow the Meilisearch integration guide to configure and connect a search engine. After setting the environment variables, clear the application cache and reload.

A record I just created or edited isn't showing up

Indexing happens immediately on save, so this should be rare. If it does happen — typically after a manual database change or a backup restore — re-run the search engine import from the command line to rebuild the indexes from the database. The exact command and options are documented at Meilisearch integration → Initial indexing.

My free-text search returns nothing

Double-check you're in the right company (the company switcher is in the top right of the navigation). Search results are scoped to the active company only — a record on a different company won't appear until you switch to that company.