The Rate Card is the contract for a customer's ongoing service: which
units sit at each site, how often a driver visits, and what you charge per
unit per billing period. It drives two things on its own: the recurring
service jobs on your dispatch board, and the customer's cycle invoices. This
article covers where the Rate Card lives, what a row holds, the buttons on
the Rate Card view, autopay and customer default rates.
Your customers never see the Rate Card. They see the jobs and invoices it
produces.
Where it lives
Open the customer and click Sites. The Rate Card has two entrances that
edit the same rows:
Edit Service Plan opens the editor for that one site.
customer's sites, with Edit service plan on each row.
There is no separate Rate Card or Billing tab on the customer. The ⓘ next to
the Rate card heading opens How the Rate Card Works, a short in-app
explainer.
New site? After you add it, the dialog offers Set up Service Plan so you
can declare the units straight away. See Customer Sites.
The Service Plan editor
Each row in the editor is one unit type at the site. Add more with Add
unit type.
| Field | What it means |
|---|---|
| Unit Count | How many of this unit are at the site. |
| Unit Type | The product from your inventory catalog. Link every row to a product; an unlinked row still bills but the job it creates asks you to match it. |
| Service Rate | The price per unit per billing period. A rate of $0 is a deliberate free unit (see below). A blank rate means nobody has priced it yet. |
| Rate Period | What the rate is "per". See the table below. |
| Frequency | How often a driver visits. This is what creates the service jobs. |
| Taxable | Turn off for a non-taxable line. |
| Bills From, Bills Until | Optional dates. A row that starts or ends inside a billing period bills only its own days (prorated). |
| Included pulls / cycle | Only on Per Trip / Per Pull rows: pulls included in the base before each extra pull bills. Leave blank to bill every pull. |
Below the rows, Additional Charges holds per-site extras such as a
hand-wash station or a damage waiver (Add Charge: name, quantity, unit
price and rate period).
Click Save. Saving creates any service jobs that are already due (see
below). End rental early… on a row ends that line on a date you pick,
and Close site at the bottom ends service at the site for good (it
returns deployed units to the yard and zeroes the counts; see
Rate periods
| Rate Period | What the rate covers |
|---|---|
| Per Month | One calendar month. |
| Per 28-Day Cycle | One 28-day cycle (13 a year). |
| Per Week | One week. |
| Per Day | Every day of the invoice's period. $2 a day bills $56 on a 28-day invoice and $62 on a 31-day month. It never changes when the customer is invoiced. |
| Per Year | A one-year contract billed once, at the start of each contract year. The year starts on the customer's billing anchor date, else the row's Bills From, else January 1. It is due on normal terms from the day it is sent. Next to rows on other periods, it still bills once a year, in full, on the cycle its contract year starts in ("(contract year …)" on the line), counting the year from the row's Bills From, else the billing anchor, else January 1. |
| Flat (one-time) | A one-time charge, not recurring. |
| Per Trip / Per Pull | Bills each completed visit at cycle close (completed visits × rate, after any included pulls). |
A new row starts on the period that matches your company's billing
cycle: Per 28-Day Cycle on a 28-day cycle, Per Week on a 7-day cycle, Per
Month otherwise. The picker shows that period plus Flat and Per
Trip; the rest sit behind Other periods… so a mismatched period takes
a deliberate click. Keep rows on your cycle's period: a Per Month row on a
28-day company bills calendar months, not your cycles.
Per Trip rows still need a Frequency. The Rate Period decides how you
charge; the Frequency decides when a driver shows up. With no frequency no
jobs are created, nothing is completed, and the row bills nothing. The only
time a blank frequency is right is genuine on-call service, where you create
each job yourself.
Free units and blank rates
serviced like any other, and the cycle invoice shows a $0 line marked
complimentary. It adds nothing to the total and is never flagged. If every
row on a customer is free, no invoice is created.
Flagged rows tile, and the cycle invoice skips it with a review flag.
Fix the rate before you send.
Frequencies
The Frequency list is Weekly, Bi-Weekly (EOW), 2x Week (Tue &
Fri), 3x Week (M,W,F), Specific days…, Monthly, Twice
Monthly, Daily and On Call. On Call never creates jobs on its
own; book those visits with Create Job. How each frequency turns into jobs
is in Recurring Service Jobs from the Rate Card.
From Rate Card to the truck
created right away, and a toast reports how many, with View board.
Unassigned on the dispatch board with an Auto-scheduled label.
(see Planning and optimizing routes).
that completion becomes the starting point for the next visit.
Nothing assigns drivers automatically; a person decides who runs what.
The Rate Card view
Sites → Rate Card shows four tiles (Cycle recurring revenue,
Active sites, Next cycle and Flagged rows), then a table with
Site / Line item, Units, Type, Frequency, Rate and
Cycle value. Cycle value is what the row bills on one invoice in its own
period.
The header buttons:
| Button | What it does |
|---|---|
| Send pay link | Texts a payment link for the customer's latest unpaid invoice. Shows only when there is one. |
| Add fee | Stages a damage fee, surcharge or one-off charge for the next cycle invoice. |
| Sync service schedule | Creates any service jobs now due. Safe to run twice; nothing is doubled. |
| Generate cycle invoice | Drafts the current cycle's invoice from the Rate Card. The button turns to Invoice created and the draft is on the customer's Financial tab. |
The ⋮ menu adds Bill previous cycle, Bill an earlier period…,
Email recipients and Skip a billing period. On a narrow screen the
header buttons move into this menu. Customers on Manual billing have no
cycle invoice buttons. Generating, catch-up invoices and skipping a period
are covered in Billing Cycles and Cycle Invoices.
Under the heading, Invoices email … shows who receives this customer's
invoices; Manage changes it (see Email Recipients).
A site row with units also offers Schedule delivery, which creates a
one-time $0 delivery job for those units. Billing stays on the Rate Card.
Autopay
The Autopay card on the Rate Card view charges the customer's saved card
automatically:
their due date."
Add card saves a card on file in a PortaPro window (the same card list is
on the customer's Financial tab). Autopay needs a saved card to charge.
See Collecting Payments.
Customer default rates
Customer default rates (below the table) holds this customer's
negotiated prices for products and services that are not part of a site's
Rate Card. They are applied to jobs, quotes and one-off invoices. When a
line is priced, PortaPro looks in this order: Site charge on rate card,
then Customer default, then Catalog price.
Rate Card rows themselves always bill their own Service Rate.