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Billing schedules

Set up recurring invoices for retainers and subscriptions, track payment plans, and pause, resume or edit any schedule.

A billing schedule creates invoices for you on a set rhythm. Use a recurring invoice for retainers, care plans and subscriptions. Payment plans, which split a project into installments, appear in the same list. This page covers creating, editing, pausing and resuming both.

Go to Invoices → Billing Schedules to see every schedule, along with your MRR and ARR and a trend chart. See Dashboard and analytics for how those are calculated.

Create a recurring invoice

  1. Go to Invoices → Billing Schedules and click Create Recurring Invoice.
  2. Under Invoice, choose the Client.
  3. Choose a Stripe Customer if you want this schedule to charge a saved payment method automatically. Leave it as None (manual payment) to have your client pay each invoice themselves. See Auto-pay and saved cards.
  4. Enter an Invoice Name, such as Monthly Retainer - {monthYear}. Use the variable menu next to the field to insert dates and counts that fill in on each invoice. See Smart variables.
  5. Set Recurring Status to Active to start billing, or leave it as Draft to save without generating anything.
  6. Under Schedule, pick the First Issue Date and How Often?.
  7. Under Number of Invoices, choose Unlimited or Set Number and enter # Invoices.
  8. Choose your Delivery Options (below).
  9. Add line items, then click Create Recurring Invoice.

Before you save, a preview sentence spells out what will happen, for example: “An invoice will be sent automatically for 12 invoices monthly starting November 1, 2026.”

Frequencies

How Often? Next invoice
Weekly 7 days later
Monthly Same day next month
Quarterly 3 months later
Biannual 6 months later
Annually Same date next year

When invoices are created

Tillage creates each invoice at 9 AM in your team’s time zone on its issue date. If you pick today as the first issue date before 9 AM, the form shows Will process at 9 AM today. After 9 AM, the earliest date is tomorrow.

Delivery options

Delivery Options sets what happens on each issue date:

Option What happens
Create draft invoice for me to send manually The invoice is created as Not Sent for you to review and send.
Automatically send invoice with email notification The invoice is issued and emailed to the client’s primary contact. You can CC other contacts or email addresses.
Automatically issue invoice without email (auto-charge) The invoice is issued with no email. Use this when the schedule charges a saved payment method.

Advanced settings

Open Advanced for:

  • Payment Terms: days after the invoice is created before it’s due. 0 means due on receipt, which suits auto-charge. 15, 30 and 60 give Net 15, Net 30 and Net 60.
  • Waive Platform Fee and Waive Processing Fee, if per-invoice fee overrides are on for your team. See Processing fees.

Edit a schedule

Click a schedule in the list, or choose Edit from its menu. The dialog has two tabs:

  • Settings: the same fields as when you created it, plus the line items.
  • History: every invoice the schedule has created so far.

Click Save Changes when you’re done. Changes apply to invoices created from then on; invoices already created aren’t changed.

A few things work differently once a schedule has created invoices:

  • First Issue Date is locked.
  • Next Issue Date is calculated from the frequency. Click Manual to set a specific date, or Auto to go back to the calculated one.
  • Recurring Status offers Draft, Active, Paused, Completed and Cancelled.

Pause and resume

From a schedule’s menu, choose Pause to stop it, or Resume to start it again.

While a schedule is paused:

  • It doesn’t create new invoices.
  • Invoices it already created that are waiting to be sent automatically are held until you resume.
  • Invoices already sent to the client are unaffected. If they’re set up for auto-pay, they’re still charged when due.

When you resume, if the next issue date is in the past, Tillage moves it forward to the next scheduled date on or after today. Periods while the schedule was paused aren’t billed.

Cancelled schedules behave like paused ones for invoices waiting to be sent.

Delete a schedule

Choose Delete from the schedule’s menu and confirm. This can’t be undone. Invoices the schedule already created stay in All Invoices.

Payment plans

When a client signs a contract or approves a quote with a payment schedule, such as a deposit and milestones, Tillage creates a payment plan. Payment plans appear in Billing Schedules with a Payment Plan badge and a count like “2 of 4 invoices”.

Edit one the same way as a recurring invoice; the dialog is titled Edit Payment Plan and the status field is Plan Status. To set up the schedule itself, see Payment schedules.

Payment plan invoices are charged automatically only if auto-charge was turned on in the contract’s payment schedule, the client authorized automatic payments, and a payment method was chosen. See Auto-pay and saved cards.

Schedule statuses

Status Meaning
Draft Saved but not creating invoices.
Active Creating invoices on schedule.
Paused Temporarily stopped. Resume any time.
Completed Finished its set number of invoices.
Cancelled Stopped for good.