Create Your Retainer Invoice Template for Technical Support Effortlessly

Retainer invoice template for Technical Support

hi there Davey from invoice ninja today I'd like to take you through one of our latest features which is client prepayments what are client prepayments well if you typically run a business where you run on a retainer model where clients have to prepay you for your services and then as you generate invoices the payment is used to then reduce the balance of those invoices how do we configure that now in invoice Ninja this is a new setting so we're heading to settings and payment settings and there's now an item called client initiated payments so we'll turn this on and you can see we'll provide another option where you can Define the minimum amount the client needs to make so let's say you only accept 500 for these prepayments you would put in 500 here if you leave it blank the client can enter in anything they like so what does this look like from the client's perspective well let's jump into the client portal and we can see now there's a prepayment option so the client would click on this enter in the description of what they're paying for and how much they're paying so let's say they want to pay you five thousand dollars could be a one-time payment if they want it to be a recurring payment based on some kind of agreed schedule they can configure this themselves so they would click on enable recurring and they can Define the number of payments or simply just click on continuance or cancel and this will run indefinitely second option is the frequency so we have all of our usual frequencies available here typically monthly is what most people would use so this will create a monthly payment for five thousand dollars it'll automatically build the payment method on file one important note is that it's not an invoice as such it's a prepayment invoice it won't use your regular invoice numbers once the payment's made we wipe this invoice from the system so it'll be there as a reference for you but from the client perspective all that will be left is a payment with an available balance so let's go through and have a look and see what this looks like we'll go through and make the payment you can see here it's completed the payment as we make five thousand dollars see there's five thousand remaining and as you start to apply payments to invoices they will appear under here and so it's a nice way for your client to understand the remaining balance and also the invoices that have been used for this payment client can then also inspect this recurring payment itself here it is here you can see it's going to send again on the 30th of April for five thousand dollars what does this look like from the admin portal let's click on refresh now if we show deleted invoices you'll see this prepayment invoices here it's deleted and this is like just a reference for you to show you when this was done and uh more just as a reference the payment itself appears here as unapplied for five thousand dollars you can see there's a an available balance here 5000 so let's go through and perhaps apply this to an invoice we'll be able to see what this looks like from the admin perspective and also from the client portal perspective so here's a invoice at the client previously had we're going to apply this payment here we go it's now been applied paid for what does it look like from the client's perspective he uses five thousand dollar payment we'll go into it so here you can see the linked invoice that we just paid and also the remaining balances left a nice way for everyone to keep on track of spending what's been happening and also any linked invoices within invoice Ninja this recurring payment will appear as a recurring invoice for you so here it is this customer five thousand dollars the next time it's going to send beyond the 30th of April we're going to auto bill this for you immediately when it's due