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: A table listing every payment term in your account, with columns Name, Pricing, Rounding, T&E Revenue, T&E Cost, Product, and Default. Checkmarks indicate which inclusion flags are enabled on each term and which term is the account default. Rows can be reordered with the drag handle on the left; the order here controls the order of the dropdown on projects. Clicking a row opens that term for editing.
To edit a term, click its row. To create one, use the add option at the bottom of the list.
On this screen: The payment term form. The top row contains Name (text input, with the term’s slug shown beneath it once saved), Pricing Model (dropdown: Fixed Fee, Time And Materials, Other), Currency Rounding (dropdown), and a Default checkbox with the helper text “When checked, new projects will initially be assigned this payment term.” Below that, a Travel/Expense Handling section with three checkboxes (Include Travel/Expense in Project Revenue, Include Travel/Expense in Project Cost, Set Travel/Expense Limit on Project?), a Product Handling section with an Include Product in Project Pricing checkbox, and a Schedule table with columns Description, Term Type, and Amount/Pct/Phase, plus an + Term link to add rows. Schedule rows can be reordered by dragging.
Term Settings
- Name: How the term appears in the payment term dropdown on projects. After saving, the term’s slug is displayed under the name; template authors can use it 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.
- Travel/Expense Handling: Whether travel and expense items count toward the project’s revenue, its cost, and whether projects on this term can set a travel limit.
- Product Handling: 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:
- Description: The text presented for the milestone (for example, “50% due upon signing” or “Upon completion of Project”).
- Term Type: Percent or Milestone. Percent rows take a percentage (all of a term’s percent rows should total 100). Milestone rows are tied to a project phase instead, and bill as that phase completes.
- Amount/Pct/Phase: The percentage for percent rows, or the phase selection for milestone rows.
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.