Role blueprint · the money
Two ledgers, and every break visible.
Money moves in exactly two directions here: clients pay the business, and the business pays the people who delivered the work. Both chains are traced end to end, and every place a chain breaks has its own report, its own owner and its own fix. This page is those two chains, the close that ties them off, and what an accountant can prove rather than assert.
One event, two ledgers, and a single hinge between them
A session generates a receivable and a payable, and both are triggered by the same moment: the professional closing the session. That is why an unclosed session is not a paperwork problem — it is simultaneously unbilled revenue and an understated cost, and it will be found at the close rather than in the month it happened.
A credit is a liability until the session is held. A held session is revenue and a cost on the same day.
Buying and booking are separate steps, which is what makes packages sellable — and it means prepaid credits sit as deferred income until they are delivered or they expire. The unbooked-credits report is therefore a finance report as much as an operational one: it is the ageing of that balance.Session → order → invoice → payment, with three ways to break
The money-chain report walks every session along this path and shows exactly where it stopped. The three breaks are not variations of one problem — they have different causes and different owners, so the column matters more than the count.
The chain, when it works
No one touches it
- A sale is madeIn the app, on the web, or entered by staff for a phone booking.
- An order is raisedAutomatically, carrying the service agreement at the version the client accepted.
- An invoice is issuedRaised from the order, found under Accounting. Once issued it cannot be edited.
- Payment is taken and reconciledAgainst the invoice, in Accounting, like any other receipt.
- The session is delivered and closedWhich is what turns the deferred credit into recognised revenue.
The three breaks, and who owns each
Worked left to right, in-month
- No orderA session created by hand, outside a sale — usually by reception. Owned by whoever created it. Fix this first: producing the missing order often produces the missing invoice too.
- No invoiceThe order never produced one. Finance owns it.
- Unpaid 30+ daysBilled and not collected. Finance owns the chase — and it is the business's job, never the professional's. Leaving it to them puts a clinician in a debt conversation with their own client.
- Incomplete chainAny combination of the above. Start at the left-hand break; the ones to its right often resolve themselves.
To correct one, issue a credit note and a corrected invoice. That is an accounting requirement rather than a limitation of the software, and the system enforces it instead of leaving it to discipline — which is precisely the property that makes the ledger worth auditing.
The payable side, and the three states a run can be in
Payments to professionals are built from closed sessions and dated contract versions, not from a spreadsheet somebody rebuilds each month. Nothing is ever billed without a person confirming it.
| Run state | What it means | How you correct it | What it costs |
|---|---|---|---|
| Draft | Calculated, nothing billed, nobody owed anything yet | Fix the underlying data and Recompute | Nothing. This is where mistakes are supposed to be caught |
| Paid | Confirmed and billed | Accounting, with a credit note | Slow, visible to the professional, and damaging to trust |
| Cancelled | Opened and withdrawn | Its sessions return to the pool and appear in the next run | Visible to the professional — replace it promptly, not at month end |
| Pay type | How the line is calculated | What finance should watch |
|---|---|---|
| Salary | Fixed per cycle, regardless of sessions delivered | Utilisation — the cost is committed whether or not the diary filled |
| Hourly | Per hour delivered | Session length against booked length, where they differ |
| Per session | A fixed amount per session held | Margin varies with the price the client paid — check it by service line |
| Revenue share | An agreed percentage of what the client paid | The percentage is frozen at booking, so a rate change affects new bookings only |
Contracts are dated versions with the history preserved: one is in force at a time, and changing terms creates a new version from a date rather than editing the old one. Sessions already booked keep the share they were priced at. That single property answers "why was I paid this?" by opening the line, and it is what stops a rate change from retrospectively repricing work already delivered.
Four screens carry the finance function
Two live in the admin portal and two in the back office, and the split is deliberate: the portal finds the problems, the back office fixes them.
Money chain
The month-end report
Payout readiness
Before every payment cycle
Payout run
Back office · HR → Expert Pay
Monthly earnings
Back office · Meetings → Reporting
Eight settings that decide the numbers
None of these require a developer, and each one changes a figure that will later be argued about. The line underneath says which.
Salary, hourly, per session, or revenue share — chosen per person and held as a dated version.
How often a run opens automatically, and the period it covers.
Whether a run includes each professional's share of the fees charged in the period. There is a switch on the run.
Notice windows, fee amounts, the grace period, and when a fee is waived.
What each service costs, its duration, and whether it is sold singly or as a package.
How long a purchased credit remains valid before it lapses.
Which methods are accepted, and how refunds are handled when one is reversed.
Whole business, selected people, or one person — with a comparison period, saved views and CSV export on every report.
Month-end, in the order that makes it short
The order matters. Each step removes a class of error the next step would otherwise inherit, which is why running them in this sequence turns a week into an afternoon.
Delivered work that was never closed is simultaneously unbilled revenue and an unrecorded cost. Close the month with any of these outstanding and both sides of the ledger are wrong — and you will discover it when the professional queries their payment.
Every session traced to a payment. Fix no order first, then no invoice, then unpaid 30+ days — because producing a missing order frequently produces the invoice that was also missing, and doing it the other way round means doing it twice.
Sessions held with no terms on file, and sessions held where the share was never frozen. Fix every row now. Correcting a payment after billing is far more work than preventing it, and it is visible to the person being paid.
Review each line in draft, recompute if anything changed, then confirm and bill. Pay the bills through Accounting as you would any supplier.
Receipts against invoices in Accounting. Anything unmatched at this point is a genuine exception rather than a missing record, because steps one and two removed the rest.
Sessions, hours, average session value, what professionals earned, what the business kept, penalty income, cancellations and clients. Table, pivot or chart, and the same numbers the operational reports used.
Cancellation fees charged, waived and never applied at all. A pattern of un-applied fees is usually a policy configured wrongly rather than staff being generous — and it is real income.
What finance stops doing
Most of the saving is not in posting entries faster. It is that the reconciliation work is done continuously by the operational reports, so the close inherits a clean ledger instead of building one.
Where the money actually is
Five places, each measurable from the reports above. None of them requires new demand — they are recovery, timing and pricing on volume the business already has.
What an accountant can prove here, rather than assert
The controls below are properties of the system rather than promises about behaviour, which is the distinction that matters in an audit, a tender or a dispute. The bar is how much of each control is enforced rather than relied upon.
Five rules the finance side is built on
Each one gives up some convenience to buy a control. That trade is the point.
Nothing is billed without a decision
A payment run opens automatically when a cycle closes, but it opens in draft. Confirming is always a human act, and the run records who did it.
Automation never creates an obligation nobody reviewed.
Corrections leave a trace
Issued invoices are immutable; clinical reports are corrected by new versions; contracts change by new dated versions. Nothing is overwritten anywhere that matters.
The audit trail is a by-product of ordinary work rather than something anyone maintains.
Price at commitment, not at delivery
A professional's share is fixed by the terms in force when the client booked, and that version is recorded on the line.
Neither party can be surprised, and no rate change has to be explained backwards.
Find breaks continuously, not at the close
The money chain and payout readiness run all month, so the close inherits a clean ledger rather than producing one.
Month-end shrinks to review, and errors are found while they are still cheap to fix.
One set of numbers, exportable
Operational reports, management reports and the accountant's file all come from the same scope control and the same period, with CSV on every one.
Nobody spends the first hour of a board meeting reconciling two versions of the same figure.