Ask for a payment

An order carries as many payment lines as the job needed: a deposit, a balance, an extra.

This is not accounting software. A free amount, a label, a state. No VAT, no invoice, no chart of accounts. What it gives you is knowing where a job's money stands, and telling your client in the same place as everything else.

Creating a line

A label and an amount. The label is what your client reads: "30% deposit", "Balance", "Additional retouching". Write it the way you would on a quote.

While the line is a draft it exists for you only. Your client sees neither the amount nor the fact that it exists.

Sending it

Sending is a separate action, and that matters: it is the moment a figure stops being your business and becomes a sum somebody is told they owe.

You have to be able to hesitate between 450 and 500 without your client watching the number change.

Once sent, the amount is frozen. Correcting a figure that has been announced means cancelling the line and asking again. You do not quietly rewrite what somebody agreed to pay.

Getting paid

Two ways, and both count.

• Online, if you have connected your Stripe account. Your client pays by card from their tracking page, and the line turns to paid on its own.
• By hand, for a transfer, a cheque, cash. You tick "I have been paid", and Kalepio records who ticked it.

The second is what makes this tab useful even if you never connect anything: you write down what you expect and tick off what arrived.

On a line collected online, the manual tick does not appear. That is the payment provider's job, and offering it would invite somebody to mark a payment paid before it is.

Cancel rather than delete

A line your client has seen and which then vanishes is a line they will ask you about. Cancelling leaves it in their history, marked cancelled, and everybody knows what is being discussed.

Deleting is only possible on a line that was never sent, or one already cancelled.

The payment link

A Stripe link can only be paid once. That is deliberate: a forwarded link cannot be settled twice.

If it has been used and you need another, "Regenerate the link" makes a fresh one and deactivates the old.

And while a payment is being confirmed, the button disappears from your client's page so they cannot pay the same deposit twice. It comes back on its own if nothing lands.