Money in and out

Manual payments sit alongside synced ones and count everywhere — revenue, margin, tax. Use it for cash, checks and anything that came through a processor you have not connected. The form has an optional Check / reference # field: type the check number or the transfer reference when you have it. It is never required, and it does one job — when your accounting system or your bank later delivers its own copy of that same payment, DeskOps recognises it as the same one, and a different check for the same amount from the same customer stays a second payment instead of being folded into the first.

Dates use your business timezone, so "today" ends when your day ends, not at UTC midnight.

Where DeskOps says revenue, it means customer payments minus refunds and minus any known sales tax. Processor fees stay outside revenue as their own expense. A tax-inclusive cash, deposit or gross-volume figure says “including sales tax” instead of calling that amount revenue.

Open the payment on Money in and choose the customer under Who paid. A cash sale you logged without a customer, or a bank deposit nobody was attached to, then counts on that customer's lifetime spend and payment count straight away, and choosing a different customer moves it off the first one. Only the account owner can do it, and Des can do it for you with an undo for five minutes. A payment that settles an invoice follows the invoice, so change the customer on the invoice instead, and a payment in a closed month stays as it is until that month is reopened.

They are two honest numbers about the same payment. Money's Processor activity row shows what your customers were charged in the last 30 days, including sales tax, what was refunded, the processor fees recorded on those payments (Stripe's fee, plus the DeskOps platform fee when the customer paid a DeskOps invoice by bank transfer; the processor's own fee on a synced charge) and what is left after fees — and that last figure is what Get Paid's payouts show settling for a DeskOps invoice payment. Every revenue figure in DeskOps is gross of processor fees, net of refunds and net of known sales tax: the fee is never hidden inside revenue, it is recorded on its own and counts as an expense, while collected sales tax is a liability. Your tax position and accountant's export use that same revenue definition. A dash in the fees column means no fee is recorded for that window, which is different from a fee of zero.

Outstanding is every invoice that has been sent and not yet paid in full, including the ones that are not overdue yet. Overdue is the part of that past its due date. Each figure is a live total of the invoices in the list, so a payment that lands — online, or one you mark paid by hand — moves the numbers at once. Open any invoice to see who it is for, when it went out and what is still owed on it.

Three steps: the customer (type a name and a new customer is saved as you go), the line items (your saved prices are one tap away, or type a description and an amount), then review and Create & email (the button reads Create & share link when the customer has no email address on file). The email carries the total, the line items and, when Stripe is connected, a Pay button. Default terms, the tax rate and tips are set on Get Paid's own Settings tab (Invoices) rather than in the business Settings, and each invoice can override them. DeskOps adds no late fees.

An accepted quote can be turned into an invoice rather than retyped.

A recurring customer is two records that DeskOps keeps linked. The contract (Get Paid → Contracts) is the money: the amount, how often it bills, when the first invoice goes out, and whether each invoice is emailed automatically or waits as a draft for you. The plan (Jobs → Plans) is the work: who goes, which days, how long — each visit lands on the Schedule as its own job. Start the contract first; its record offers Book its visits, which opens the plan with the customer and the contract already chosen, and the plan's Bills through field points back at the contract. Pausing or cancelling one does not touch the other, and both confirmations say so.

A contract can carry a one-time setup fee — a join fee, an initial treatment, an onboarding charge. It goes on the first invoice only (a $59 monthly membership plus a $25 setup fee bills $84 first, then $59), it is never repeated, and pausing and resuming never adds it again. The review step shows the first bill and the ongoing bill separately, and the customer's authorization names the fee.

DeskOps sends every new contract's invoices — there is nothing to choose. With Stripe connected, each invoice carries a Pay link, it shows on your customer's own page, and your customer can agree to automatic payments for that contract. Without Stripe connected, DeskOps still sends the invoice and your customer pays it by check, cash or bank transfer. A contract you set up earlier through Stripe keeps running there: Stripe emails its invoices and your customer pays them on Stripe's page.

A contract billed through Stripe shows each cycle in Get Paid as Stripe drafts it — the invoice, its hosted link, and the payment once it lands — under the same number series as everything else, so a renewal is never something you have to go and look for in Stripe. If the customer's card is declined on a cycle, that invoice says so in words and the contract reads past due on Contracts until that invoice is paid, then returns to active on its own. Nothing is charged twice: the money you see is the money Stripe settled.

Scan work order takes a photo or a PDF of the form and fills in a draft invoice from it — who you bill, the site address, the work order number and the scope of work — so nothing is retyped. Check every field before you send it; nothing goes to the customer until you do. The scan option appears for trades that work from dispatched work orders.

A discount is an amount on that one invoice, taken off the subtotal before tax is worked out, and it cannot be more than the subtotal. There is no per-customer discount rate that applies automatically — each invoice carries its own, so a standing arrangement with a customer is something you apply each time rather than set once.

You can also just tell Des — "spent $240 on gas" logs it, with an undo chip in case it read the number wrong.

Revenue with no costs attached is unknown margin, not 100% margin — DeskOps refuses to print a percentage it cannot stand behind. If margin looks impossible, the usual cause is that money is arriving through one source while costs live in another that is not connected, or that expenses are landing in the wrong category. Check Settings → Expense categories and which integrations are actually syncing.

Expenses is every dollar out in one place — what synced from your bank and books, plus anything you entered by hand. It groups by category, which is the same split the Profit page and the tax packet read from, so what you see here is what those pages are working with.

Categories arrive from your bank or accounting feed and are a guess based on the vendor. After you fix one, DeskOps offers to suggest that category for the same vendor's future imports; say Yes and later rows from that place show the suggestion for you to Apply or turn down — it never changes them on its own. The fix flows through to Margin and to the tax packet, because both read the same categories.

The board is open to you and to managers. The Types, Pricing, Plans and Materials tabs are yours alone as the owner, because Types shows per-job margin and Pricing holds your own prices — a team member who can open the board never sees them.

Prices are yours — DeskOps never guesses what you charge, because a guessed rate would quietly poison every margin number downstream. Enter them on Pricing, or let them come from your own work: the first time you charge a suggested item on an invoice or quote and have no price saved for it, the price you charged is saved as your rate. After that only you change it.

Costs are what turn a job from revenue into profit. The list offers expenses you have already logged that are not on a job yet, so log the receipt first on Expenses (or scan it with Des) and then attach it. Until something is attached, DeskOps reports that job's margin as unknown rather than as 100% — a job with money in and nothing out is one whose costs it has not been told about, not a job that cost nothing.

Taxes shows expenses, quarterly estimates and progress through the tax year, and it is where the CPA packet comes from.

The CPA email address comes from Settings → Business details → CPA Email on a computer, or Settings → Business details → CPA email on your phone. If the advisor offers to send it, it will show a confirm popup first — it never emails your accountant on its own.

These help you and your CPA see the position. They are not a filing service — DeskOps prepares the numbers, your CPA files the return.

Commissions calculate on payments that land after the closer is assigned. If the customer has already paid you, DeskOps asks whether to backfill commissions on those past payments too; changing a customer's closer retracts the previous closer's unpaid commissions on that customer and backfills the new closer. A commission already marked paid is never rewritten — a correction is booked as a new negative entry so the history stays honest. On your taxes a commission counts when you mark it paid, in the year you paid it — the same date the 1099 summary uses; one still owed is not deducted yet.

A customer that arrived from a connected processor or your accounting system is partly editable and partly not, and it is worth knowing which. Email, phone, address, notes, tags and status are yours to fill in on any customer — syncs routinely miss a phone number — and a correction you make stays: the next sync will not put the old email, phone or address back. The NAME on a synced customer is locked, because it belongs to the connected account and the next sync would only fight you for it; rename them there instead. A customer you added by hand has no locked fields at all.