Understanding Charges and Invoices

This article explains the way billing works in BarnManager: you add charges to your customers, and BarnManager turns those charges into invoices for you on a schedule. It covers one-off and recurring charges, how billing contacts and their linked contacts get billed, the billing schedule, and what happens once an invoice exists.

The most important thing to know is that you don't need to build invoices by hand. Your job is to make sure every billable thing — board, lessons, a bag of supplements, a farrier visit — is recorded as a charge on the right customer. BarnManager collects those charges and, on each customer's billing schedule, bundles them into an invoice automatically.

Think of it like a shopping cart. Every charge you add drops into that customer's cart. When their billing day comes around, everything sitting in the cart is swept onto one invoice. You can still create an invoice manually for unusual situations, but for everyday billing you should be reaching for "Add charge" and "Add recurring charge," not "New invoice."

This keeps billing accurate and low-effort: nothing gets forgotten, invoices generate themselves according to your set schedule, and you review rather than build.

A charge is a single billable line — a description, a quantity, a price, optional tax and discount, and the customer it belongs to. A charge can optionally be tied to a specific horse, which is useful when a customer has more than one. Until it lands on an invoice, a charge sits in the unbilled state, waiting in the customer's cart.

There are two ways charges get created.

One-off charges. For anything that happens once — a product sale, a one-time fee, an adjustment — you add a manual charge directly to the customer. Enter the description, unit cost, quantity, and tax, and it drops into their cart as an unbilled charge. While a charge is still unbilled you can freely edit or delete it.

Recurring charges. For anything that repeats — monthly board, a standing weekly lesson, a stall fee — you set up a recurring charge once. A recurring charge is a template: it holds one or more line items (each with its own price, quantity, discount, and tax) and a schedule. On that schedule, BarnManager automatically generates a fresh charge into the customer's cart. You set it up a single time and the charges keep appearing on their own.

A recurring charge can repeat weekly, bi-weekly, monthly, quarterly, or yearly, on a specific day of the week or day of the month. It can run forever, until a chosen end date, or for a set number of occurrences. You can pause a recurring charge (it stops generating new charges but isn't deleted), resume it, or end it entirely.
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​Note that the schedule you set = the schedule the charge is added to the account, NOT the date the invoice is sent. If you want invoices to send as frequently as the charges, you'll need to set your invoice schedule accordingly. We suggest setting recurring charges to hit the account a few days before the invoice is set to generate so that you have a chance to review all of the charges that will be swept onto the invoice.

One useful rule: when you edit a recurring charge, the change takes effect on the next billing cycle, not retroactively. Charges already generated aren't altered, and there's no mid-cycle proration.

BarnManager understands that the person responsible for paying isn't always the only person involved. A customer can be set up as a billing contact with one or more linked contacts attached to them.

The rule is simple: all charges for linked contacts roll up to, and are paid by, the billing contact. If a parent is the billing contact and their two children are linked contacts, every lesson charge on either child appears on the parent's invoice. You record charges associated with whichever contact they actually relate to — the linked contact — and BarnManager makes sure they land on the billing contact's bill. The billing contact receives one consolidated invoice and is the party who pays it.

Each customer has a billing schedule that controls when their cart of unbilled charges becomes an invoice. The schedule has a few parts:

You don't have to configure this for every customer one by one. BarnManager has global default billing settings for your barn. Each customer's billing settings include a "Use default (global) settings" toggle:

The practical approach is to set sensible global defaults once, leave most customers on them, and only switch the toggle off for the customers who bill differently.

You don't have to press a button to create the routine invoice — the billing schedule does it. Here's the sequence.

On invoicing day, BarnManager automatically gathers every unbilled charge in the customer's cart and assembles them into a draft invoice. The draft behaves like any draft invoice. You can review it, edit it, add or remove items, or correct anything that looks off. If you delete the draft entirely, its charges simply return to the unbilled cart and wait for the next cycle. What happens next depends on one setting: auto-send.

Each customer's billing settings include an "Automatically send invoice on the invoice date" toggle. This is the choice between hands-off and hands-on billing.

Auto-send on. If you haven't already sent the draft yourself, BarnManager emails it to the customer automatically on the billing day. Invoices can go out every month without you touching them.

Auto-send off. Nothing is emailed automatically. The invoice simply remains a draft in your invoice list. It waits for you to review it, approve it, and send it whenever you're ready. This is the right choice if you want a human to approve every invoice before it is sent.

Either way you get a draft invoice. The only difference is whether the send step is automatic or done by you.

We'll soon be building customer portal functionality. Once that's in place, we will give you the ability to auto-charge a stored payment method, with the customer's permission.

However an invoice is created, it carries a status that tells you exactly where it stands.

Draft — Assembled from the customer's charges but not finalized or sent. Fully editable. This is also the only stage at which an invoice can be deleted (its charges return to the cart if you do).

Unsent — Finalized but not yet emailed to the customer.

Sent — Finalized and emailed to the customer. The email includes a link to view and pay online.

Overdue — Passed its due date without being paid in full. BarnManager checks for this automatically every night.

Partially paid — A payment was received but didn't cover the full amount; a balance remains.

Processing payment — The customer submitted an online payment that's still clearing. Bank/ACH payments in particular take a few business days. An invoice that's mid-payment won't be flipped to overdue underneath a pending payment.

Paid — Paid in full, whether online or by a payment you recorded.

Voided — Canceled, with a reason kept on record. Use this when an invoice was issued in error but you want to keep the paper trail.

When a customer opens their invoice link they can pay by card or by bank/ACH, processed through your connected payment account - depending on your settings. They can save a payment method for next time; saved methods are tied to your barn specifically, so a customer who pays two barns through BarnManager won't see one barn's saved cards on the other.

Online payments carry a processing fee. Each barn decides whether to absorb the fee or pass it to the customer — another setting on your payment account. The amount depends on how they pay:

For larger invoices, bank/ACH is almost always cheaper thanks to the $5 cap — worth mentioning to customers paying sizable board bills, if you're passing along the fee.
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Online payments update the invoice on their own: a payment that's still clearing moves it to Processing payment, and once it clears it becomes Paid (or Partially paid). A failed online payment doesn't leave the invoice stuck — it drops back to Sent or Overdue so it stays visibly unpaid.

For checks, cash, or transfers handled outside BarnManager, you record the payment yourself against the invoice — the amount, the date, the method (cash, check, bank payment, credit card, PayPal, or other), and optional notes. You can record a payment against any finalized invoice, including correcting one already marked Paid; you can't record one against a draft.

BarnManager adds up all payments and sets the status accordingly: meet or exceed the total and the invoice becomes Paid, cover only part and it becomes Partially paid. The balance shown is always the total minus everything paid, so partial payments are tracked precisely. You can edit or remove a payment record you entered, and the status recalculates to match.

Each customer's billing settings include reminder timing — how many days before the due date BarnManager should automatically nudge the customer about an unpaid invoice. Reminders go out on their own daily schedule once an invoice has been sent.

If a sent invoice passes its due date without being paid in full, BarnManager marks it Overdue during a nightly check (the one exception: an invoice that's mid-payment stays in Processing payment instead).

If a draft needs changes, just edit it — drafts are fully editable, and a draft you no longer want can be deleted, which returns its charges to the cart. Once an invoice has been finalized and sent, you can't freely rewrite its line items; if something is wrong, void it with a reason and issue a corrected one, which keeps a clean record. For small payment corrections, edit or remove the payment records without touching the invoice itself.

Manual invoice creation still exists — but ideally it won't be your everyday tool. For anything that recurs, and for anything tied to a regular customer, we suggest that you add a charge or a recurring charge instead and let the billing schedule do the sending.

Questions this article doesn't cover? Reach out to support and we'll help you get set up.

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