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Collect a deposit
By the end of this article you will be able to take a deposit on a booked job and know exactly what happens to that money when the job is invoiced.
A deposit is a card charge taken against a job before there is an invoice. It is held for the customer and applied to the job’s invoice the moment that invoice is created, so the customer only ever owes the balance.
Set the percentage once
- Open Settings › Company and find Deposit Percent.
- Enter a whole number between 0 and 100. This is the share of the job total the app asks for; 50 is the default when nothing is set.
- Next to it, Collect a deposit when customers book online decides whether your online booking page asks for the same percentage by card before it confirms the appointment. It is a separate switch — the percentage is shared, the online ask is not automatic.
Collect it on a job
- Open the job. On a job that has not been invoiced, the header shows Collect Deposit.
- Click it. The dialog shows the amount and how it was worked out — for example “50% of the $240.00 job total”. The figure is the app’s, not yours: it is computed from the job total on the server so a customer is never asked for a hand-typed number.
- Enter the customer’s card details in the form. Our payment provider processes the card; we never see or store the number.
- Click Charge — the button shows the amount. On success you see “Deposit of $… collected”, and the payment appears under Billing › Payments with the type Deposit.
The card is charged once. It is not saved to the customer’s profile, so a later balance is a fresh card entry or a payment link.
What happens next
- Create Invoice on the job builds the invoice, and the deposit is applied to it on creation. The invoice’s Balance Due shows the total less the deposit.
- If the deposit covers the whole invoice, sending the invoice marks it Paid straight away.
- Once a job has an invoice, Collect Deposit goes away — from then on you collect the balance, not a deposit. The button is also absent on a cancelled job.
Good to know
- One live deposit per job. A second Collect Deposit is refused while one is already captured. A deposit that was declined, voided or refunded does not block a new one.
- Refunding a deposit is not available from the web app — see Refund a payment.
- Card payments must be set up first — see Get set up to take card payments. The charge uses your plan’s card rate.
- Who. Taking a deposit needs billing edit access — the Admin and Accounting roles.
- A deposit with no invoice yet shows on the Payments › Transactions tab with an Apply button. You will not normally need it: creating the job’s invoice applies the deposit for you. It is there for cash that never met an invoice — a job that was cancelled after the deposit, for instance — so it can be put against another of the customer’s invoices.