PayPolka

Recurring invoices

For retainers, maintenance work, or other repeat charges, save a recurring invoice so you don’t have to recreate the bill each month. PayPolka prepares a draft on your chosen schedule. You review and send it, and the client pays using your invoice’s payment options. If the client has set up autopay, sending the draft also charges their saved card or bank account, and you can choose to have those invoices go out and charge on their own.

Where they live

New Recurring is the second button on the Invoices page, next to New Invoice. The templates themselves are on the Recurring tab: client, subject, cadence, amount, next invoice date, and a status of Active or Paused, with Edit and a delete icon on each row. A client on autopay has a line under their name saying what happens to each invoice: Autopay: charged when you send it, or Autopay: sends and charges on its date.

The fields

  • Client, from the drawer picker.
  • Subject, “Monthly retainer” or the like. It lands on every invoice made.
  • Cadence: Monthly, Quarterly, or Yearly.
  • Next invoice date.
  • Payment terms: Due on receipt, or Net 10, 15, or 30. Sets each draft’s due date from its issue date; Due on receipt makes it due the day it’s issued.
  • Tax rate (%) and Discount rate (%).
  • Notes, copied onto each draft.
  • Active, a checkbox that appears once the template is saved. Untick it to pause without losing the setup.

Below that, Line item templates: Type (Labor, Service, or Item), Description, Quantity, Unit price, and Add line item. At least one line is required. The amount column on the Recurring tab is what these lines add up to with tax and discount, so it matches the draft that will come out.

When the draft appears

At 6am in your account’s time zone, any active template whose next invoice date is today or earlier becomes a draft invoice, dated with that scheduled date and due per its terms, with the template’s lines copied in. The template’s next date then moves forward one month, three months, or a year. Drafts are only made while your subscription is active.

The draft shows up on the Invoices tab like any other draft, with “from recurring schedule” in its history. Open it, change anything you like, and send. From there it’s an ordinary invoice: reminders, payments, receipts, all in Invoices.

Set a next invoice date in the past and the draft appears within the hour, or at 6am if it’s earlier than that. If the date is several periods back, one draft appears each hour until the schedule catches up. That’s the fastest way to check a new template does what you meant.

Prepaid blocks

A block of hours sold up front is billed this way. There’s no separate retainer feature.

Say a client buys 20 hours of Development a month at $150. Make a recurring invoice with one Labor line: “Development, prepaid block”, quantity 20, unit price 150, cadence Monthly. Each month a $3,000 draft appears; you send it.

The draft a recurring invoice makes has no project, so it never pulls in logged time. The block is the line. The team logs hours on the project as usual, and those hours are what you compare against the block.

Autopay

A client can save a card or US bank account for your recurring invoices from their client portal, once your account takes cards or bank payments online. Only invoices made by a recurring schedule are charged this way. A one-off invoice to the same client is paid the usual way.

By default nothing changes about the draft: it still waits for you. When you send it, PayPolka charges the saved method, and the invoice email tells the client it’s being charged and when. A card is charged the day you send. A bank account is charged 10 days after you send, or on the due date if that’s later, so the client sees the amount first.

To skip the review step, turn on Send and charge autopay invoices on their own in Settings, Payments. Then each autopay client’s invoice is emailed and charged on its date without a draft stop.

If a charge is declined or the card needs the holder to confirm, the client gets an email with the link to pay, you get a notice, and nothing is retried. Each invoice is charged once; sending it again only re-emails it.

What it doesn’t do

Without autopay, it doesn’t send and it doesn’t charge anyone. It never skips a period on its own. Those decisions are yours to make on the draft each time.