Payment Terms

Payment terms define how a project is priced and billed: the pricing model (fixed fee or time and materials), whether travel, expenses, and products are included in the project’s numbers, and the payment schedule your documents present to the client. Every project has a payment term, selected on the Project Overview screen, and document templates can branch on the selected term to render the right pricing presentation.

To create or modify payment terms, navigate to Settings > Financial > Payment Terms. You need the Payment Terms permission to view this page.

On this screen: The Payment Terms page has Active and Archived tabs and a + Add A Payment Term button in the header. The table columns are Name, Pricing, Rounding, T&E Revenue, T&E Cost, Product, and Default?, in that order. Checkmarks indicate enabled inclusion settings and the account default. Click a row to edit it. Select rows to use bulk Delete on the Active tab or Restore on the Archived tab.

To edit a term, click its row. To create one, click + Add A Payment Term. Removing a term archives it, and it can be restored from the Archived tab.

On this screen: The payment term form starts with Name, followed by Pricing Model, Currency Rounding, and a Default? toggle. Pricing Model offers Other, Fixed Fee, and Time And Materials. Three more toggles control Include T&E in Revenue, Include T&E in Cost, and Include Product in Pricing. Under Schedule, choose Percentage of total or Project milestones. The table has Description and either Percentage or Phase columns, followed by a remove control for each row. Add a Term + adds a row. Schedule rows can be dragged to reorder them when there is more than one row. Save and Cancel appear in the header, with Save and Add Another when creating a term.

Term Settings

• Name: How the term appears in the payment term dropdown on projects. Template authors can use the term’s slug to branch on a specific term in documents.
• Pricing Model: Fixed Fee, Time And Materials, or Other. This drives how pricing behaves on the project and which pricing presentation your document templates use. Templates can test the model directly (for example, rendering an hourly rate table for time and materials terms and a payment schedule table for fixed fee terms).
• Currency Rounding: How displayed amounts are rounded in pricing output.
• Default?: New projects start with the default term. One term per account is the default.
• Include T&E in Revenue and Include T&E in Cost: Whether travel and expense items count toward the project’s revenue and cost.
• Include Product in Pricing: Whether product (materials) pricing is included in the project’s pricing.

The Payment Schedule

The Schedule table defines the billing milestones for the term — the rows a client sees in the payment table of a generated document.

Each row has a Description, the text presented for the milestone (for example, “50% due upon signing” or “Upon completion of Project”).

The schedule type applies to the whole schedule. Choose Percentage of total to enter percentages in the Percentage column; these should total 100. Choose Project milestones to select a project phase in the Phase column and bill as that phase completes.

A single-payment term still needs one schedule row (for example, “Upon completion of Project” at 100%). The schedule is part of the data available to document templates, so a term with no schedule rows offers nothing for a template’s payment table to display — if a document’s payment section comes out empty on one specific term, check that the term’s schedule is defined.

After changing a payment term’s settings or schedule, regenerate affected documents with Force Regeneration checked — settings changes don’t always invalidate previously generated documents. See How Document Generation Works for details.

Schedules are built from dynamic project values, so the rows resolve against the project at generation time rather than being typed in as fixed amounts.

Percentage-based schedules

Percentage-based schedules are calculated from the percentages you specify. For example, on a project priced at $1,000:

• Payment 1 — Percentage — 25% → $250.00
• Payment 2 — Percentage — 75% → $750.00

Milestone-based schedules

Milestone-based schedules are calculated from the phase alignment of services in the project. For example, on a project priced at $1,000 with revenue distributed across phases:

• Phase 1 (Prepare): 12.5%
• Phase 2 (Plan): 12.5%
• Phase 3 (Design): 25%
• Phase 4 (Implement): 50%

With this schedule:

• Payment 1 — Milestone — Plan
• Payment 2 — Milestone — Design
• Payment 3 — Milestone — Implement

The platform produces:

• Payment 1: $250 (Phase 1 + 2 revenue)
• Payment 2: $250 (Phase 3 revenue)
• Payment 3: $500 (Phase 4 revenue)

The platform identifies the first schedule item (Plan, Phase 2) and automatically adds up all revenue from the beginning through that phase. Each subsequent payment captures the revenue between the previous and current milestone.

Balance due

Any remaining amount in either a percentage or milestone-based schedule generates an automatic “Balance Due” item showing the difference between the summed payments and the project’s total price.

One-time products in a schedule

A one-time product’s full amount is placed in the first payment of the schedule, whether the schedule is percentage-based or milestone-based. These schedules distribute your service revenue across the payments, but a one-time product always falls into the first payment rather than being spread evenly across the term.

There is currently no setting that splits a one-time product evenly across the payment term. The “Amortize Over All Months” option on a Managed Services term applies to professional services only, not products, and setting a product to a recurring billing frequency multiplies its total by the term count rather than dividing the existing amount. If you would rather a product not affect the schedule’s other payments, you can exclude products from the payment term (turn off Include Product in Pricing) and invoice them separately.