A security, cleaning, landscaping or facilities firm signs a contract and then bills the same amount every month for a year. The work is operational; the billing is clerical - and it is the clerical half that quietly costs money. An invoice raised on the 8th instead of the 1st is a week of cash flow gone, and a corporate client will not remind you.
Where the money leaks
- Monthly invoices are raised by hand, so they go out late or not at all
- The quote and the invoice are separate documents that drift apart
- Corporate clients pay on their own schedule and nobody is chasing
- Your own suppliers and staff get paid out of a different system entirely
From quote to schedule
Send a quote with the contract’s line items. When it is accepted, the same lines become a recurring schedule at the contract’s cadence, so what you quoted and what you bill cannot disagree. Zana raises each invoice on the date with the right VAT and, with auto-send on, delivers it by email, SMS, or WhatsApp with a pay link.
Site-level extras - an additional guard for a month, a deep clean - are one-off invoices against the same client, landing on the same statement and the same balance.
Worked example. A guarding firm holds eight contracts worth KES 180,000 a month each. On the 1st, Zana raises and sends all eight. Two clients pay on 30-day terms, so they age quietly and get reminded automatically; the finance manager watches a receivables list instead of rebuilding invoices.
Collect, reconcile, and pay out
Clients pay by M-Pesa or card on the link, or by bank transfer against the invoice reference - which is reconciled from an uploaded statement rather than matched by eye. Arrears ageing shows which contracts are 30, 60, or 90 days out. Your own suppliers and staff are paid from the same workspace through payouts, with maker-checker approval on anything that moves money.
What this is not
This is contract billing, not workforce operations. If your invoice is calculated from attendance - guards clocked in, hours approved, a timesheet signed off - that is Site Services, which is currently offered only to design partners. Tell us before you sign up rather than after, and we will say plainly which of the two you need.
What you’ll need
Your contract list with the monthly value, a cadence, and the client contact each invoice goes to. Quotes are optional - a schedule alone will bill the contract.