Progress billing the client: sequences, partials and retention

Why productions bill in parts

A production spends for weeks before it delivers, and cash flow is the reason productions bill in parts: a deposit on signature, progress invoices against milestones — prep complete, shoot wrapped, delivery made — and a final invoice that trues everything up. The client's perspective is the mirror image: each payment should map to work demonstrably done.

The milestone structure is therefore a negotiation about risk. A client holding payment until delivery finances the production themselves; a production billing everything up front asks the client to carry the risk. The sequences land somewhere between, and the terms that matter are what each invoice covers, when it's due, and what's held back.

Sequencing, partials and the numbering that holds them together

Progress billing runs on explicit sequence: invoice 2 of 4 against a stated total, each numbered, each showing what it covers and what remains. The numbering isn't bureaucratic — it's what lets both sides verify that the parts add up to the whole, that nothing is double-billed and nothing falls between the parts.

Partials are where production invoicing gets specific. The client approved a total; each invoice draws down that total by the milestones it bills; and the arithmetic of remaining-to-bill has to reconcile exactly. Productions that number their invoices against the project's job reference, and state the current and total sequence on every document, close that verification loop without a phone call.

• •Deposit, progress invoices against milestones, and a final true-up.
• •Sequence numbering — 2 of 4 — makes the parts verifiably add up.
• •Retention holds a share until the work is proven; release is its own event.

Retention: the client's holdback

The mirror of the production's vendor holdbacks is the client's retention — a percentage of each invoice, typically 10 percent, held until delivery and acceptance, released on the final invoice or shortly after. The production's job is to track it as money earned but held, not as money absent: at any moment, the difference between billed and collected should decompose into invoices due, overdue and retention held, exactly.

Retention disputes at the end of a project are usually scope disagreements wearing accounting clothes, which is the practical argument for invoicing against the same line structure the bid was built from. When invoice lines and budget lines share a structure, 'what was delivered' and 'what was billed' can be compared line by line.

The invoice must reconcile to the bid

A client-facing invoice is a claim about work performed under an agreed budget. The strongest invoicing is built directly from that budget: the production services fee, insurance, contingency and overage treatments computed exactly as they were in the bid, and each progress invoice showing its share of the same line items. When the invoice's arithmetic differs from the bid's — a fee applied on a different base, an overage treated inconsistently — the client's accountant finds it, and credibility spends the rest of the project repairing.

Overages and change orders sit on top as their own, dated, approved amounts — billed when approved, not silently folded into the next invoice's totals. The clean pattern is one the whole industry recognizes: the bid, the change orders, and the invoices all reference the same line structure, and the total is the arithmetic sum of the three.

How Clarice handles this

Clarice's invoices are built from the project they bill: line items reference the budget's structure, the production services fee, insurance and contingency compute the same way they did in the bid, and sequence numbering — current against total — is native to the invoice record.

Overages enter as dated, described, approved records and are included in billed totals automatically, PDF exports produce the client-facing document from the live data, and the payments dashboard tracks the lifecycle — billed, due, overdue, retention held — so collections is a status view rather than a reconciliation project.