Service Plans

What it is

Service Plans is where you sell memberships — the kind of arrangement where a customer pays you every month (or every quarter, or once a year) and in return you show up a set number of times. Two tune-ups a year. Four gutter cleans. A monthly pool visit. Whatever your version of it is.

You build a plan once, and then hand it out to as many customers as you want. The card is charged automatically through Stripe on the schedule you set; Joby keeps the score of how many visits each customer has coming and how many you have already delivered.

You open it from Settings›Quotes & Docs›Service Plans. The page header reads "Memberships billed on a schedule. Stripe charges the card — you deliver the visits."

Four screens make up the whole feature, and the first three buttons at the top right of the plan list take you to them.

When to use it

• You want money coming in between jobs — a maintenance membership, a service contract, a "priority customer" club.
• You already do repeat visits for somebody on a handshake and you keep forgetting to invoice them, or forgetting to go.
• You want the card charged automatically instead of chasing a cheque every quarter.
• You want to know, on any morning, who is owed a visit before their year runs out and whose card just bounced.

Use Estimates instead for one-off quoted work, and Payments when you just need to take a single card payment. A service plan is specifically for a recurring arrangement with visits attached to it.

Before you start

• Card payments have to be switched on. Memberships are charged through Stripe, so your company needs its Stripe account connected first. Open Payments from the left menu — if you see a Connect Stripe to collect payments card, press Connect with Stripe and finish that before you sell anything. Full details are in the Payments guide.
• Service Plans has to be turned on for your account. If it is off, the Service Plans card is not in Settings and the address quietly sends you somewhere else. Ask your account owner or support to enable it.
• You need the Settings permission. All four Service Plans screens sit behind it. An owner or admin grants it under Settings›People›Team Roles. Without it, staff can still be given the tabs described below, but they cannot build or edit plans.
• The Service Plans tab is granted separately for leads and for clients. Under Settings›People›Team Roles there is a Service Plans tab switch in the Lead tabs group and another one in the Client tabs group. If a role has neither, that person cannot assign a plan to anybody. See Team Roles & Permissions.
• Your company details should be filled in. The page your customer opens is branded from Company Settings — logo, accent colour, phone, email and address all show up there. Set them before you send the first invitation.
• Have an email address for the customer. The activation invitation goes out by email. You can create a membership without one, but nobody can activate it until you add an address and send the invite.

Step-by-step

1. Build the plan

1. Go to Settings›Quotes & Docs›Service Plans and click New plan at the top right.
2. At the top of the form, choose Fixed price or Customer builds it. Fixed price is the normal one — a single price on a single schedule. (There is a section on the difference further down.)
3. Under Basics, fill in Name — this is the only required field. Add a Description (the customer reads it on their plan page), an optional Service type to tag the visits, and an optional Cover photo via Add cover photo.
4. Under Price & schedule, read the row like a sentence: Charge $89 every month. The drop-down offers every month, every 3 months, once a year, every week, once — one-time and on a custom schedule… (which adds an "every [number] days / weeks / months / years" box).
5. On the next line, set the Cycle: 1 year with 2 visits included. The grey box underneath reads the whole thing back to you in plain English — for example "Your customer pays $89.00 every month and gets 2 visits every 1 year. The plan renews automatically." If that sentence is not what you meant to sell, fix the numbers.
6. Decide on Auto-renew. On means the next cycle starts by itself. Off means billing and service stop on their own at the end of the cycle — nothing to remember to cancel.
7. Set Member discount if members get a percentage off work that is not part of the plan.
8. Leave For sale switched on under Availability so the plan shows up when you go to assign it.
9. Glance at the Customer preview card on the right — it updates as you type and it is the card your customer sees. Then click Create plan.

2. Put a customer on it

1. Open the customer. From Clients in the left menu, open the client and pick the Service Plans tab. (You can do the same on a job: open it from Leads and use its Service Plans tab.)
2. Click Assign plan.
3. In the Assign service plan window, click one of the plan tiles under Plan template. The tile shows the price and the visits per cycle.
4. Check Customer name (required), Email and Phone — they are pre-filled from the record. Add Internal notes if you want; those are staff-only.
5. If the client has more than one saved address, pick the Service location. Each location can carry its own plan.
6. Press Save & send to create the membership and email the activation link straight away, or Save to create it quietly and send the invitation later from the card.

The membership is now Pending. Nothing has been charged. It becomes Active only after the customer opens their page and pays.

3. Send (or resend) the invitation

1. On the plan card in the Service Plans tab, click Send invite. Once it has gone out once the button reads Resend invite.
2. The customer gets an email with a link to their own plan page. There they read what is included and press Activate my plan, which opens Stripe's secure checkout.
3. Want to see exactly what they see, or send the link yourself? Click Portal on the card — it opens their page in a new tab.

4. Book the visits

1. Once the membership is active, the card shows a ribbon reading No visits scheduled with a Schedule button. Click it.
2. In Schedule visits, press Auto-distribute to spread the remaining visits evenly across the customer's current cycle, or Pick manually to start from an empty list.
3. Adjust any date, use Add another visit for one more, and the bin button to drop one.
4. Add Notes (optional) if there is something the crew needs to know — "always go in the morning, gate code 1234". The note is attached to every visit you are scheduling right now.
5. Press Save schedule. The ribbon changes to Next visit · Tue, Mar 4, 2026 and its button becomes Manage.

5. Tick a visit off after you do it

1. Click Mark visit complete on the plan card.
2. If you had visits booked, the Mark a visit complete window opens so you can say which one you just did. Pick it, add notes if you want, and press Mark complete.
3. If nothing was booked, the visit is simply recorded on the spot and you get a message like "Visit recorded (1 of 2 this cycle)".
4. Use Visit history on the card to see Upcoming visits and Completed visits side by side.

How to check it worked

• The plan was created: you are dropped back on the plan list and the new plan is in it, with its price on the right and its cadence underneath — something like "2 visits per year · auto-renews".
• The customer was assigned: a card appears on their Service Plans tab with a grey Pending badge, and the number badge next to the plan on the Settings list goes up by one.
• The invitation went out: the Invite box on the card changes from Not sent to the date it was sent, and you get a confirmation naming the email address it went to.
• The customer actually paid: the badge turns green and reads Active, the Renews box fills in with a date and a days-left count, and the plan list at Settings›Quotes & Docs›Service Plans starts showing a Monthly recurring revenue figure across the top.
• Visits were booked: the ribbon on the card reads Next visit with a date, and the same visits turn up under Upcoming visits on the Activity page.
• A visit was recorded: the Visits this cycle bar moves, the count next to it goes up, and the visit moves from Upcoming to Completed in the history.
• Everything, in one place: the Recent activity list on the Activity page records Plan assigned, Invitation sent, Plan activated, Visit completed, Plan renewed, Payment failed and Plan cancelled as they happen.

Common mistakes

• Archiving a plan does not cancel anybody. Archive only stops the plan being offered to new customers. Existing members keep their membership, keep getting charged, and keep their visits. To end one person's membership you cancel it on their card.
• "Cancel" on a card is two different things. After you press Cancel you get Keep, End at cycle and End now. End at cycle lets them use the time they already paid for; End now stops it immediately. Pick deliberately.
• Auto-renew on with one-time billing. The form warns you: "Auto-renew is on but billing is set to one-time. The plan will not renew because there is no recurring charge." Turn auto-renew off, or choose a repeating cadence.
• Sending an invite with no email address. Save & send stops with "Add an email address to send the invite, or use Save". Fill in the email, or save it as pending and send it later.
• "Link expired" from the customer. Invitation links do not last forever. The customer sees "This invitation link has expired. Please contact the company to send you a new one." Press Resend invite on their card.
• Marking visits complete that you never booked. That works, but the Upcoming visits list on the Activity page then has nothing in it, so nobody can see what is still owed. Book the dates first and tick them off as you go.
• Looking for the plan you archived. The list hides archived plans by default. Flick the Archived switch at the top right of the list to bring them back into view.