How do I collect a deposit or bill a job in stages?

Open the project's Financials tab and use the Create invoice menu. It offers four ways to bill the same approved work: Manual, In full, In stages, and Deposit invoice. Pick the one that matches how you get paid and Coastline does the arithmetic.

Every path creates drafts. Nothing reaches your customer until you send it.

The four paths

• Manual. A blank invoice, or one that starts from a single estimate. Use it when the job does not follow the approved work neatly. This is the only path that does not need an approved estimate.
• In full. One itemized invoice carrying every line from every approved estimate, so the customer sees the same detail they agreed to.
• In stages. Between 2 and 12 invoices that add up to what is left. You set the amounts; the last one is always the balance and adjusts as you type.
• Deposit invoice. One deposit now and one invoice for the balance later. Enter either a percentage or a dollar amount and Coastline shows you the other as you type.

All three of the last paths bill against your approved estimates, so they need at least one approved estimate on the project. See How do I create and send an estimate?.

What a deposit looks like to your customer

They see a document headed Deposit invoice with your normal invoice reference, and the amount due is the deposit, not the contract. The only mention of the wider job is the line itself, which reads something like 30% of approved value, so they can see what the deposit is a share of.

They do not see the balance invoice until you send it. It arrives later as an ordinary invoice, headed Invoice like any other.

How the balance invoice keeps itself right

The second invoice a deposit creates is named Remaining balance, and while it is still a draft it re-totals itself to whatever is genuinely left. The same is true of the last invoice in a staged split.

What is left means everything approved on the project, minus every invoice you have actually sent. Drafts do not count, because nobody has been billed yet, and voided invoices do not count, because a void undoes the bill. So:

• Approve a change order and the balance invoice grows to include it.
• Void an invoice and the balance invoice grows back by that amount.
• Send another invoice in between and the balance invoice shrinks.

It stops adjusting the moment you send it, which fixes the number your customer was given. It also stops if you reshape it by adding sections or lines of your own, because at that point the invoice is yours rather than a running total.

While it is still tracking, the builder tells you so above the lines.

Watching the job as a whole

The project's Financials tab shows four figures side by side: Approved, Invoiced, Collected, and Remaining to bill. Remaining to bill is allowed to go negative, and reads as over the approved value when it does, because a project that has been billed past what was agreed should say so rather than quietly show zero.

If a manual invoice would push the project past its approved value, the builder says so before you send: it names the overage and the approved total. It is a warning, not a block. Billing more than was approved is often deliberate, and this is only here to make it a decision rather than an accident.

Limits worth knowing

• A deposit cannot be more than what is left to bill, and must be between 1% and 100%. A 100% deposit simply creates no balance invoice.
• A staged split is between 2 and 12 invoices. The final one is the balance and cannot be typed into.
• Deposits and stages are billed as a single line rather than a slice of every item, because a third of one item is not a real quantity. Use In full when the customer needs the full itemization.
• A balance invoice with nothing left on it cannot be sent, so a customer never receives an invoice for zero with a live pay button.

Once an invoice is sent, its due date follows your payment terms. See When is a new invoice due? and When does Coastline remind my customers about an invoice?.