Client Billing

Connect Sodium to your chosen accounting platform. Once services are active on a client, Sodium creates a preview invoice for you to approve. Once approved, the invoice goes straight through to your accounting software. When you're comfortable with how it works, you can turn on auto-approval so the whole cycle runs without you.

Every client has a Billing Schedule: the list of every charge Sodium plans to raise for them, past and future, each with a date, the period it covers, the amount, and a status. It is built from the services and packages that client is on, and it rebuilds itself whenever you change one. Nothing has to be invoiced, or even exist as a line yet, for you to see it.

So you can answer "what are we billing this client, and when?" without opening your accounting platform or working it out from a start date and a frequency. Recurring fees, set-up fees, catch-up fee instalments and one-off charges all sit on the same schedule, and each row shows the description the invoice line will actually carry, before the line exists.

When to bill. Each service says when its fee is billed: in arrears, after each period ends; in advance, when each period starts; or when the work is done, by a Bill for Work step in the task's workflow rather than on a schedule. Set it once on the service, and change it for any client who is billed differently.

A scheduled charge is not fixed until it is billed. You can:

• Skip it, when a month is on the house or the work did not happen. It stays on the schedule as a skipped charge rather than just disappearing.
• Override it. Change the description, quantity, price or date for just that one occurrence.
• Bill it now, pulling a charge forward instead of waiting for its date.
• Add a charge that no service covers, for one-off work.

Anything you have not touched keeps following the service. Put your prices up and every unbilled charge on every schedule moves with them.

Because the schedule looks forward, it also adds up. Your billing settings show planned charges month by month for the next twelve months across the whole practice, at today's prices: a forecast of what you are due to invoice, straight out of the work you have already agreed.

Some firms want to review every line before it goes out. Others trust the automation and just want invoices sent. Sodium supports both.

In your billing settings, you can choose whether generated line items are automatically approved or held as pending for manual review. This default can be overridden per client, so you might auto-approve for most clients but require approval for a handful that need special attention.

Pending line items sit in a review queue on the client's Billing tab. Approve them individually, or approve in bulk — once approved, they're picked up by the next invoice submission run. To bill without waiting for the run, select line items and invoice them now. Deleting selected line items puts any time billed on them back to unbilled.

Not everything you bill is recurring. When you need to charge a client for a one-off piece of work — a consultation, a late filing, an extra return — you can add a billing line by hand straight from the client's Billing tab. Set the description, amount, accounting code, and VAT rate, and it sits alongside the lines Sodium generates automatically.

Manually added lines are treated exactly like generated ones: they follow the same approval rules and are picked up by the next invoice submission run, so there's nothing separate to remember. Add an ad-hoc line whenever you like and it lands on the client's next invoice.

Billable hours work the same way. If your practice uses time tracking, unbilled time converts into billing line items — one combined line per hourly rate or an itemised line per entry — and lands on the client's next invoice alongside everything else.

Each service can define a description template for its invoice lines using tokens like {{ ServiceName }}, {{ Month }}, and {{ Year }}. A service called "Bookkeeping" with the template {{ ServiceName }} - {{ Month }} {{ Year }} produces line items like "Bookkeeping - June 2026".

If you don't set a template, the service name is used as the description. Either way, you can edit the description on any individual line item before it's invoiced.

Client billing is enabled in Settings, where you configure the defaults for your practice:

• Invoice day of month — which day (1–28) invoices should be dated. Can be overridden per client.
• Payment terms — default payment terms in days (e.g. 28 days). Can be overridden per client.
• Approval required — whether generated line items need manual approval before invoicing.
• Default accounting code — pulled from your connected accounting platform, used when a service doesn't specify its own code.
• Create invoices as drafts — leave each invoice as a draft in your accounting platform so you can check it there before approving it.
• Email invoices to clients — have the invoice emailed to the client as soon as it's raised.

The email comes from your accounting platform rather than from Sodium, so it uses your existing invoice template and payment link, and the invoice is marked as sent there.

Each service can also have its own accounting code (nominal code) and VAT rate — Standard, Reduced, Zero, Exempt, or Out of Scope. When you're choosing the code, Sodium presents a list pulled directly from your accounting software, so you pick from the real codes in your chart of accounts rather than typing them in. The code and VAT rate flow through to every invoice line automatically.

Not every client gets charged VAT. Set a client's VAT treatment to "outside the scope of UK VAT" — for a client who belongs abroad, say — and no VAT is applied to their proposals or their invoices, whatever the services on them are rated at. And if your practice isn't VAT registered at all, say so once in your practice details and VAT stops appearing anywhere.

Once enabled, a Billing tab appears on every client page, with the client's Billing Schedule, their billing lines and their invoice submissions each on their own sub-tab, and the per-client settings alongside them.