Sending a customer a statement
A statement is one page showing everything a customer has not paid for yet, oldest first and aged in days, which you can send from their customer page at any time — and it is a picture of where they stand today, not a document with a number that has to be filed.
Somebody is three months behind and you want to put it in front of them in writing. That is a statement. Open the customer, press send, and they get one page.
What is on it
- Every job they have not paid for, oldest first, with the date it was finished and how many days ago that was.
- What each job came to, and anything already paid against it.
- Any late fee, on its own line rather than buried in the price of the work.
- One total, and — if you take payments through LakeOps — one link that pays the lot.
It is not an invoice, and not a receipt
A statement is where a customer stands today. A receipt is frozen the moment money moved. Send the same statement tomorrow after a payment lands and it will say something different, correctly. A receipt never changes, because it is evidence of one specific payment.
It is not an invoice either. There is no number on it, nothing is filed, and sending it twice creates nothing. It restates work you have already told them about.
If you charge sales tax
Each line is the amount the customer owes for that job, tax included, and says so. The per-authority breakdown lives on the completion email they got at the time and on the receipt once they pay — repeating it here would be a second place for the two documents to disagree.
By hand, or on a schedule
Sending one by hand is always available and always the same document. If you would rather not remember, LakeOps can send it for you when a debt reaches a certain age — see payment reminders. The reminder is the same statement with a sentence of chase on the front, so the numbers can never differ between the one you send and the one it sends.
Still stuck? Ask us — or go back to the help center.