Services & invoicing

Most of an agency's income is recurring: hosting, care plans, SEO retainers, the annual domain renewal you handle on a client's behalf. TLDTrack lets you record the things you sell, attach them to the clients who pay for them, and build a month-by-month schedule of what needs invoicing, so a renewal or a retainer is never quietly forgotten.

Services vs subscriptions

The distinction matters, and it is worth getting straight up front:

• A service is a template. You define it once. "Managed hosting, £15/month" or "SEO retainer, £500/month" or "Domain renewal, £20/year". It carries a default price, a currency and a billing period, and it does not belong to any one client.
• A subscription is the real, billable instance. You take a service, attach it to a client, and set the price they actually pay (which can differ from the default), the cycle, and when the next payment is due. One service can power many subscriptions, one per client.

So you might have a single "Managed hosting" service and twenty subscriptions to it, each at a slightly different price for a different client. Change how you think about the service and you edit it once; change one client's price and you edit their subscription.

Prices and billing cycles

A subscription carries the money and the timing:

• Price and currency. The amount this client pays each cycle. It defaults from the service but you can override it per client.
• Billing period. One-time, monthly, quarterly or annual. This is what TLDTrack uses to work out the next due date and to project the schedule forward.
• Status. Active, paused or cancelled. Only active subscriptions count towards your recurring revenue and appear in the live schedule.
• Start, next-due and end dates. When it began, when the next payment falls, and (optionally) when it stops.
• A per-cycle override. If one particular cycle costs a different amount, for example a one-off uplift, you can set a cycle price without disturbing the standing price.

From your active subscriptions TLDTrack also works out your monthly recurring revenue, normalising every cycle to a monthly figure (a quarterly subscription counts as a third of its price per month, an annual one as a twelfth), so you have a single number for the recurring book. Prices in different currencies are added together as they are, without conversion.

How the invoicing schedule works

This is the part that earns its keep. Each subscription has an invoice offset: the number of days before the due date that you like to raise the invoice, 30 by default. TLDTrack takes the next due date, subtracts the offset, and that is the subscription's invoice date.

The Subscriptions screen then groups every subscription into months for a chosen year, using either the invoice date or the due date, and gives you a running total per month. Annual subscriptions are projected forward so a future year's schedule is already laid out. For each line you can:

• Mark it invoiced for that year. TLDTrack records the amount and date against that cycle, so the schedule shows at a glance what has been billed and what is still outstanding.
• Exclude it from the total for a year, for when a line is bundled into a larger retainer and should stay visible but not double-counted.
• See last year's figure alongside this year's, so you can spot where a price should have moved and hasn't.

One-off jobs on the same schedule

Not everything recurs. When you complete a piece of one-off work as a job card, you can turn it into an invoice line too. The amount can be seeded from the billable time logged against the job, then edited. Those one-off lines drop into the same monthly invoicing view alongside your recurring subscriptions, so a single screen shows the whole month's billing, retainers and project work together.

Automatic invoicing reminders

Recurring services can generate an invoicing reminder for you on a schedule, so the schedule chases itself. A service can be set to raise an invoicing card weekly or monthly, on a chosen day, with a lead time before the period so it lands in good time. There is a one-click option to switch these on for every recurring service at once, which defaults to a monthly card with a week's notice. From then on the reminders appear automatically and you simply work through them.

Setting it up, step by step

1. 1
   In the agency workspace, open Services and create the things you sell: give each a name, a default price, a currency and a billing period.
2. 2
   Assign a service to a client: choose the service, pick the client (and a specific site if it applies), set the price they pay and the cycle, and set the next due date.
3. 3
   Set the invoice offset if 30 days before due is not how you work.
4. 4
   Open Subscriptions and pick the year. Every subscription is laid out month by month with totals.
5. 5
   Each period, raise the invoices in your accounting tool and tick each line as invoiced here so the schedule stays honest.
6. 6
   Optionally switch on automatic invoicing reminders so recurring services prompt you without being chased.

Good to know

• One service can power many subscriptions, each at its own per-client price.
• Only active subscriptions count towards recurring revenue and the live schedule. Paused and cancelled ones drop out.
• Marking a line invoiced is per year, so a subscription's history builds up cycle by cycle.
• Excluding a line keeps it on the schedule for visibility but out of the invoice total, which is how you handle anything folded into a retainer.
• Services and invoicing are part of the Agency CRM. It is included on the Agency plan and is a paid add-on on Starter and Pro.

Where to manage services