How instant billing works

Finish the job. The card gets charged. Move on to the next stop.

Instant billing is the reason most lawn pros switch to Mowzey. The second a crew marks a job complete, Mowzey generates the invoice and charges the card on file. No paper invoices, no email follow-ups, no waiting two weeks for a check.

The flow

Job is marked complete by the crew in the field, either from the mobile job card or from the routes screen.
Mowzey generates the invoice using the service prices on that job, adds the $3 platform fee, and applies the gross-up surcharge if you have it turned on.
If the customer has a card on file, Stripe charges it immediately. The customer gets an emailed receipt.
If there's no card on file, the invoice still sends — the customer receives an email with a hosted payment link they can pay with any card.
You get paid out on your Stripe payout cycle (daily by default).

The whole loop, from job complete to charged, usually finishes in under 10 seconds.

Why it's faster than traditional invoicing

The old playbook looks like this: finish the job, write it down, send an invoice at end of week, wait, follow up at 30 days, follow up at 60 days, maybe write it off at 90. Cash is stuck on the porch for a month or more.

With instant billing, there's no aging A/R, no chasing, and no awkward conversations. Customers know upfront they'll be charged the day the work is done — usually they appreciate it, because they don't have to remember to pay.

What needs to be set up

Three things have to be in place for instant billing to fire:

Your Stripe account is connected. See Connecting your Stripe account.
The customer has a card on file. See Collecting cards on file from clients.
The service has a price set in Settings → Services. If a job has only zero-priced services, no invoice is generated.

Pro tip

If you want to gross up the customer's invoice so you net the full service amount after Stripe processing fees, turn on Pass processing fees to customers in Settings → Payments. Mowzey will add a calculated surcharge line to every invoice.

What happens when there's no card on file

Instant billing doesn't fall over when a customer hasn't given you a card yet. The invoice still generates and sends — the customer gets an email with a Stripe-hosted payment page where they can pay with any card, Apple Pay, or Google Pay.

Two things to know about this case:

The invoice is marked pending until they pay. It shows up in your overdue list if a week goes by.
After their first payment, Stripe stores the card. The customer can opt in to saving it for future jobs — and the next invoice will charge automatically.

Turning instant billing off

You can turn auto-charge off for a single customer from their profile (toggle Auto-charge on completion) or globally for your whole account in Settings → Payments. With it off, completed jobs still generate an invoice — they just send as a payment link instead of charging the saved card.