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. It doesn’t automatically send invoices or charge cards.

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.

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: Net 10, 15, or 30. Sets each draft’s due date from its issue date.
• 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

A job runs at 6am every day. 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.

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 the next morning. 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.

What it doesn’t do

It doesn’t send. It doesn’t charge the client’s card. It doesn’t skip a period on its own. Those are all decisions, and they’re yours to make on the draft each time.