Most software bills you when a job is marked done. That sounds right until February, when a week gets rained out and the customer who agreed to pay you $200 a month gets a bill for $150. Or worse, a visit gets skipped and nobody ever charges for it at all.
A billing plan fixes that by separating two things that were never the same thing: what the customer owes you, and when you happen to visit them.
1 Open the customer and find the billing card
Go to the customer, and look for How this customer pays. That card is where the plan lives. A customer with no plan yet shows Start plan.
One plan per customer, and it covers everything you do for them. If they own four houses, that is one plan, not four.
2 Decide what they are charged
What are they charged? is the first real decision, and there are two answers:
- The same every month. One agreed price, however many visits the month held. This is the one most operators want. Twenty-six cuts a year at $200 a month is the deal both of you actually made, and it does not wobble with the weather.
- Add up the visits. One invoice a month listing each visit and its price. Use this when the work genuinely varies and the customer expects to see it itemised.
Pick The same every month and you also set Amount each period. Pick Add up the visits and there is no amount to set, because the price is the visits.
3 Decide when they pay
When do they pay? has two options and they are plain English on purpose:
- Before the work, at the start of the month. The bill lands before the month begins, so the customer has it in hand when the work starts.
- After the work, for the month just finished. The bill goes out once the month closes.
One rule worth knowing: Add up the visits cannot be billed before the work. You cannot total up visits that have not happened yet, so choosing it removes the pay-up-front option. That is a database rule, not a form quirk, so nothing downstream can get around it.
4 Set the cadence and, if it is a season, the end date
How often? offers Every week, Every two weeks and Every month.
Ends on (optional) is what makes a plan a season. Leave it empty and the plan simply continues, which is what a year-round customer wants. Set a date and billing stops there, which is what a March-to-November season wants. Both are normal, which is exactly why the field is optional rather than required or forbidden.
Then Start plan.
5 What happens to the visits
This is the part worth understanding, because it is the whole point.
Once a customer is on a plan, completing one of their jobs no longer raises its own invoice. The visit is held against the plan instead. Then once a period is due, ClippingCash raises one invoice for that period and the held visits are settled by it.
That holding happens at job completion, wherever the job is completed from, including the crew app, and it happens whether or not your automatic invoicing is switched on.
So: a rained-out week costs the customer nothing extra and you nothing either, because the bill was never the visit. And a skipped visit can no longer quietly become revenue nobody invoiced.
6 When the invoice actually goes out
A daily sweep raises plan invoices at 11pm in your own time zone, not in some server’s.
- Before the work plans are billed the evening before the period starts, so the customer has the bill when the month opens rather than a day into it.
- After the work plans are billed the night the period closes.
An invoice raised at 11pm does not mean a customer emailed at 11pm. Automatic invoice emails are held back to a sensible daytime window, so the bill sits and sends in the morning. That applies to all automatic invoice emails now, not just plan ones, so a job you mark done at 10pm no longer texts and emails somebody at 10pm either. Your own manual send button is never delayed, because when you press send you mean now.
7 Changing or stopping a plan
Change the amount, the cadence or the end date on the same card and the change applies going forward.
Pausing a plan is not the same as cancelling it. Pausing stops the billing and keeps the agreement, so it comes back. Cancelling ends it.
If you try to cancel a plan that still has completed visits held against it and not yet billed, ClippingCash refuses and tells you how many visits are waiting, rather than cancelling and stranding the money. Bill the outstanding period first, then cancel.
8 Work that is not part of the plan
Not everything a plan customer buys belongs on the plan invoice. A one-off gutter clean in the middle of a mowing plan is a per-job decision: bill it now, or hold it for the plan invoice and let it ride along with the month.
Default to billing separately anything the customer would not expect to see inside their agreed monthly figure. A surprise line on a predictable bill generates the phone call the plan was supposed to prevent.
A note on quoting it
Today you set a plan up on the customer, on the card above. Quoting a monthly or seasonal rate directly, so the customer approves the terms and the plan is created from the approved quote, is being built now and is not here yet. Until it is, the plan is something you set after the conversation rather than something the customer signs.
Which customers this is for
Not everyone. It earns its keep on:
- Anyone who has said “can I just pay you monthly?”
- A fixed season, where the customer pays the same nine months running whether it rained or not.
- Anyone you have quietly been under-billing because a skipped visit never made it onto an invoice.
Leave your casual and one-off customers alone. Per-job invoicing is the right shape for work that genuinely varies.