Payments

Everything about money lives here: what you've invoiced, what's been paid, and how clients can pay you.

The four parts

Payments in the sidebar opens into four places.

Invoices. What you send a client asking for money.

Payments. Every payment you've received. It also holds the payments clients say they've made and you haven't confirmed yet.

Items. The reusable things you charge for, so you're not retyping "Wedding coverage, 8 hours" every time.

Settings. Five tabs. General holds your default payment terms and your numbering. Invoice Defaults holds the text on every new invoice. Display sets how the document looks. Tax Rates holds your tax rates, and Payment methods holds the ways you accept money.

Two ways to get paid

Card payments through Stripe. The client presses Pay on the invoice, enters a card, and the money reaches your Stripe account. CoreHue records the payment and updates the invoice on its own.

Stripe is the only card processor for client payments. How you pay for CoreHue itself is separate and lives under Settings → Billing.

Manual payment methods. Instructions you write yourself, most often a bank transfer. The client reads them, pays however you asked, and presses I've made this payment. You confirm it, and that's when the payment is recorded.

You can offer both, and most people do. Cards are convenient. Transfers avoid processing fees on large amounts.

See Card payments and Manual payment methods.

What CoreHue takes

Nothing. CoreHue takes no cut of your client payments.

Stripe charges its own processing fee on card payments. The fee is recorded against the payment. Open the payment from Payments and a Payment breakdown shows the amount received, the fee, and what you kept.

A normal cycle

1. Create an invoice, from scratch or from a contact, inquiry or booking
2. Send it
3. The client pays by card, or pays manually and tells you
4. CoreHue records the payment and updates the invoice
5. The client can download a receipt, and you can email them one
6. It appears in your finance report

Reminders chase unpaid invoices for you. See Invoice reminders.

Where invoices come from

Not always by hand. An invoice is created for you when a client books a service that takes payment, and when a proposal is accepted. Those invoices behave like any other. The only difference is where the client pays: on the booking page or the proposal page rather than the invoice page.

An invoice can also be view-only

Each invoice chooses which payment methods it accepts. Choose none and the invoice becomes a document to read rather than a bill to pay. Your client sees the lines and the total, with no way to pay online. That's useful for a record of work already settled. It's a mistake if you were expecting money.

Getting set up

1. Set your currency, which CoreHue asks for the first time you create an invoice or an item
2. Set your numbering, which CoreHue asks for once, just before your first invoice
3. Connect Stripe, or write your manual payment instructions, or both
4. Add tax rates if you charge tax
5. Send an invoice

Connecting Stripe means passing their checks. Those happen at Stripe, not in CoreHue, and can take days. Start early.