Almost no fit-out job is billed in one go. A £480,000 office refurbishment goes out as a deposit on order, a couple of stage payments as the floors come together, a completion invoice, and a retention release months later. The logic is simple. The arithmetic, done by hand, is where it quietly falls apart.
Someone builds the schedule in a spreadsheet: 30% deposit, 30% at first fix, 30% at completion, 5% retention. That is 95%. The missing 5% is not caught until the final invoice, when the numbers refuse to reconcile against the contract sum and a client's accounts team starts asking why the totals don't match the order. Now you are re-issuing documents and explaining an error that should never have been possible.
Billing that has to add up before it goes out
A phased schedule has one non-negotiable property: the phases must total exactly 100% of the contract value. Not roughly, not "we'll sort the last one out at the end" — exactly, before the first invoice leaves the building.
In Vyntworks, invoice schedules are built to enforce that. You set out the phases against a job and the system holds them to 100% — it won't let a schedule go live at 95% or 105%. You can build those phases three ways, depending on how the job is priced:
- Fixed percentage — the classic 30-40-30, or a 25% deposit with the balance in stages. You type the percentages; the pounds are calculated from the contract sum.
- Fixed amount — set an exact figure per phase where the client has agreed specific milestone sums rather than a split.
- Valuation-based — each invoice reflects the percentage of work actually complete, for jobs billed on progress rather than fixed dates.
Because the schedule is anchored to the priced job rather than a separate workbook, the number you invoice against is the number you quoted. There is no re-keying step between the estimate and the bill where a digit gets transposed or a row gets dragged one cell too far.
Set the billing rhythm once, apply it in a click
Most contractors bill the same handful of jobs the same handful of ways. A shopfitter who always takes a deposit, a mid-job payment and a completion balance shouldn't be rebuilding that pattern from scratch on every quote.
That is what payment plans are for — a named, reusable billing template. Save your "50/40/10" once, or your "25% deposit, monthly valuations, 5% retention" pattern, and apply it to any quote in a click. Vyntworks then generates both the invoice schedule and the payment-terms wording that prints on the quote document, so the terms your client reads and the schedule you'll bill against are guaranteed to say the same thing. Every company starts with three ready-made plans — 50/40/10, deposit-plus-monthly-valuations-plus-retention, and 100% on completion — to edit or delete.
Change a plan later and only future quotes pick up the change; a schedule already generated on a live quote stays exactly as it was. So tidying up your standard terms never silently rewrites the billing on a job already underway.
Nothing goes out without the right sign-off
A balanced schedule is only half the job. The other half is making sure each phase actually gets invoiced, on time, by someone allowed to authorise it.
Each invoice runs a clear lifecycle — scheduled, approved, authorised — and Vyntworks does the chasing. Approval-reminder emails go out every Monday for invoices due in the next seven days, so a stage payment doesn't sit forgotten while the cash it represents has already gone out the door on labour and materials. When an invoice is authorised it can push straight to Xero — as a draft to review or as an authorised invoice — and the Xero status mirrors back, so Paid and Voided keep Vyntworks in step without anyone re-checking two systems.
Invoicing, schedules and valuations are part of Vyntworks from the Pro plan up — see what's included at each tier.
Where this actually saves you
The value isn't glamorous, and that's the point. It is the re-issued invoice that never has to happen, the 5% that can't go missing, the completion payment that doesn't get overlooked because a reminder landed on the right desk. Across a year of jobs, those small, invisible saves are the difference between a billing process that leaks and one that closes cleanly every time.
If you'd like to see phased billing built on one of your own jobs — with your standard payment pattern saved as a plan — book a walkthrough and we'll set it up on a real quote so you can watch the schedule balance to 100% in front of you.