Ask an independent operator what they dread and it is rarely the members. It is the first week of the month. Raise the invoices. Send them. Watch the bank. Work out who has paid, who has paid the wrong amount, and who has paid nothing. Match each payment to an invoice. Key the lot into the accounts, or hand a spreadsheet to someone who will. Then, around the tenth, start the polite emails.
Most workspace software helps with one or two of those steps. The trouble is the joins between them, because every join is a place where the numbers stop agreeing. pleXpad Manage was built around a single invoicing engine that does all of it, so there are no joins.
One engine, from invoice to Xero
Here is the sequence, and the point is that it is one sequence rather than four tools.
The invoices raise themselves. Every membership has a next invoice date. When it arrives, the billing run raises one invoice per member for that period, prorated where a plan changed mid-month, with any negotiated rate or discount already applied. A company paying for its team gets one consolidated invoice rather than five. Each invoice is numbered from your own sequence (PX-00123, say) at the moment it is issued, never before, so there are no gaps and no drafts wearing real numbers.
You can rehearse the run first. Before anything is numbered, sent to Xero or charged, you can preview exactly what the run would raise, for whom, and for how much. If a figure looks wrong you fix the membership, not the invoice, and preview again. Nothing has happened yet.
Collection happens on the member's chosen rail. A member who set up a Direct Debit mandate in the portal is collected automatically when the invoice is raised; each collection is single-shot, so an invoice cannot be taken twice. A member without a mandate pays by card from the portal, or at the desk. If a mandate is not yet ready when an invoice is raised, the invoice waits and collects the moment the mandate becomes usable, without anybody remembering to retry.
Payments match themselves to invoices. Whether the money came by Direct Debit, card or a bank transfer you keyed in by hand, it is allocated against the invoice it settles, and the invoice rolls to paid when the balance reaches zero. An overpayment is booked as credit on the member's account, not lost. A part payment leaves the invoice part-paid with the remainder still owed, which is what it is.
Xero gets what you issued, not a guess at it. Invoices, credit notes and payments push to your Xero with the same document numbers you issued in pleXpad Manage, in their own sequence alongside anything you key into Xero by hand. When a payment is recorded on the Xero side, pleXpad Manage learns about it too, so the two systems do not drift apart while you are not looking. If a push fails, it is retried and the failure is visible on screen rather than buried.
When somebody does not pay
The chase is the part people hate most, so it is automated where it should be and left to you where it should not be.
An invoice past its due date becomes overdue on its own. If you have reminder emails switched on, the member receives a reminder from your mailbox, with a link that takes them straight to the invoice and a way to pay it. There is a ladder of reminders, not an endless drip, and a courtesy re-send from the invoice screen does not count as one of them.
When you want to see who actually owes you money, the outstanding figure on your reports leads to the people behind it: which payer, how much, how long. That is the list you pick the phone up with.
And when an invoice was genuinely wrong, you raise a credit note. It is a real document with its own number (PXC-), it is allocated against the invoice it corrects, it cannot exceed that invoice, and it goes to Xero as a credit note. Not a negative invoice, not a manual adjustment your accountant has to ask about in April.
What it costs, plainly
The engine is included in every pleXpad Manage plan; there is no billing module to buy. When money moves on the rails we run, there is a platform fee: 0.6% on card payments and 0.5% on Direct Debit, with a single Direct Debit collection never costing more than £5. Your total platform fee is capped at £149 a month on the Studio and Grow plans and £269 on Scale, whatever you collect. Payments you take outside the system, such as a bank transfer you record by hand, carry no fee at all.
For comparison, Stripe's own invoicing and recurring billing product charges 0.7% of volume for invoicing alone, before you have matched a payment, raised a credit note or spoken to Xero.
Run a month before you decide
The free trial is the whole product for 14 days with no card required, and the billing run is part of it. Start at manage.plexpad.com/register, load a few members, and preview a billing run against real plans. If month-end still looks like a job after that, we would like to hear why.
