Free template
Client Payment Schedule Template
A payment schedule that tells you what is genuinely late, rather than one big number labelled "owed". Outstanding, due now and overdue are three different figures and this sheet keeps them apart.
After importing, check that the date columns are formatted as dates rather than text. The status column compares them against today, and text will silently produce the wrong answer.
What is in it
| Column | What it holds |
|---|---|
| Instalment | What this payment is for. Deposit, on delivery, monthly, final. |
| Due date | When it falls due. This is what makes "due now" answerable. |
| Amount | What is due on this instalment. |
| Invoice number | Fill in when you actually raise the invoice. Blank means not billed yet. |
| Invoiced date | When it was billed. The gap between this and the due date is usually yours, not the client's. |
| Received | What has actually arrived against this instalment. Partial amounts are fine. |
| Status | Calculated per row: Paid, Overdue, Due today or Not due. |
| Still owed | Calculated. Amount less received. |
The arithmetic
Already in the file. Here so you can check it rather than take it on trust.
Outstanding
Agreed value - Received
Due now
Still owed on rows that are Overdue or Due today
Overdue
Still owed on rows that are Overdue. A subset of due now
Not yet invoiced
Agreed value - Invoiced
Client credit
Received - Agreed value, when received is the larger
The four numbers people confuse
This is the whole reason the sheet is shaped the way it is.
- Received is money that has arrived. Whether it has been matched to a specific instalment does not change that it arrived.
- Outstanding is agreed value less received. What is still owed across the whole engagement.
- Due now is only the instalments whose date has come. A client can owe you a great deal overall with nothing due yet, and chasing them would be wrong.
- Overdue is the part of due now that is late. It is a subset. Adding it to due now double counts it, which is the most common error on a sheet like this.
One more that is not owed at all: not yet invoiced. Work you have agreed and have not billed. The client cannot pay an invoice you have not sent, and this is usually the largest single delay in getting paid.
And if a client pays more than they owe, that surplus is credit, which is their money that you are holding. It is not a discount and it is not a negative balance.
Where a spreadsheet stops
- One sheet per client does not scale. Fifteen clients means fifteen sheets and no way to see total receivables.
- Nothing chases anybody. The sheet knows what is overdue. It will not tell you, and you will not look at it on the right day.
- Partial payments across several invoices get messy fast. One payment settling parts of three instalments is normal and awkward to represent in rows.
- The invoice and the schedule drift. Two records of the same commitment, maintained separately, disagree eventually.
How Bikabo does this
A schedule that raises the invoices.
This sheet tells you what to bill and when. What it cannot do is bill it, which means somebody still retypes the figures into an invoice, and the invoice number gets copied back by hand.
In Bikabo the Agreement carries the schedule, invoices are raised from it without retyping anything, and payments recorded against them feed the same outstanding figure the engagement reports. The four numbers stay in agreement because they read the same records.