How to set up Automatic Billing

Automatic Billing is available on the Solo and Team plans, and access is granted per business while the feature rolls out. If you cannot see it, contact us and we will switch it on for your account.

You need the money permission for your business to view or change the settings. Owners always have it.

Go to Settings in the sidebar, choose the Money tab, then scroll to Automatic Billing. Everything starts switched off, so nothing changes until you turn it on.

The panel shows your current billing schedule at the top so you can see exactly which day invoices will be raised.

The first switch, Automatic Billing, is the master control. With it off, no invoice is created and no email is sent, and every other billing screen behaves exactly as it always has.

The controls below it follow a hierarchy. Invoice generation only becomes editable once the master control is on, and sending only becomes editable once generation is on.

If you turn a parent off later, your child settings are remembered. Switch it back on and your previous choices are still there.

Automatic Billing does not introduce a new schedule. It uses the billing day and mode already set for your business, for example weekly on a Friday or monthly on the last day.

Individual clients can have their own billing override. Those clients are billed on their own day, not the business day, so a Friday run will not include a client set to Sunday. They are picked up when their own day comes around.

A run happens once per day after 09:00 in your business timezone, and only once for each date.

With Automatically generate invoices on, each client who is due that day and has unbilled work gets one invoice covering all of it.

Any credit on the client's account is applied to the invoice in the same way as a manual invoice, and the invoice number continues the same sequence as invoices you create by hand. There is no separate numbering.

Automatically created invoices are marked with an Auto badge on the payments screen so you can tell them apart at a glance.

Leave Automatically send invoices off and every invoice is created as a draft. They appear on the Drafts tab of Billing and Payments, ready for you to review, edit and send when you are happy.

Turn sending on and pick who receives them. Send to client emails each invoice to the client and marks it as sent. Send to owner emails them all to you instead, so you can forward or check them first.

You can also choose whether the email includes the invoice in the body or a secure PDF download link.

• Clients with no email address on file are left as drafts, with the reason recorded on the run
• Drafts do not appear on the Outstanding tab until they are marked as sent
• You can bulk mark drafts as sent from the Drafts tab at any time

The panel has its own run controls so you can see exactly what would happen without waiting for your billing day.

Leave Dry run selected and choose Run a test. Nothing is created and no email is sent. You get a list of every client, the invoice that would be raised, and a reason for anyone skipped, such as 'Not due today: billed weekly on Sundays'.

Ignore today's run guard lets you run again on a date that has already been processed, which is useful while you are setting things up.

When you are ready, Run for real does the same work properly: invoices are created and, if sending is on, emailed.

After every real run that creates invoices, PawLoop emails the business owner a summary. It lists each invoice with the client, the number, how many items it covered, the amount and whether it was emailed.

Anything skipped is listed with the reason, so you always know why a client was not billed. A View invoices button takes you straight to Billing and Payments.

Dry runs never send a summary, and a run that creates nothing does not email you.