Work that comes back round

Plenty of work repeats: the landlord's yearly check, the quarterly service, the monthly clean, the five-year re-inspection. The money is in remembering it before the customer does — or before somebody else does.

Steps

1. Open the customer.
2. Under Repeating work, choose Set up.
3. Fill in What work — the job that repeats.
4. Pick a Job type if one fits. Every job the repeat raises gets it, and an EICR fills in five years for you.
5. Set How often and Next due.
6. Check Where the work is. It starts as the customer's address — change it if the work is at another property, like a rental a landlord owns.

That is the whole setup. One customer can have several, so a landlord with four flats is four repeats, each at its own address.

What happens when it falls due

A real job is raised in your jobs, a little before the due date — 14 days by default, and you can change that. It carries the address and job type from the repeat, and it's listed under Repeating work on your dashboard until you pick it up. Not a reminder in a list you will learn to ignore — an actual job you can schedule, quote and invoice like any other.

Nothing is sent to the customer. Whether and when to get in touch is yours.

When the next one is counted from

The day the raised job is done: when you mark it completed, or when it's invoiced or paid, whichever comes first. A job done three weeks late doesn't keep every visit after it three weeks late.

Stopping one

Close the raised job as lost and the recurrence stops. If the customer has gone elsewhere, you are not chased about it every year.

What this is not

This is not recurring invoices. An invoice with no job behind it is an accounting job, and Xero already does it well. What repeats here is the work.