Deposit and staged payment calculator
Split a job into payments the customer can follow, with the deposit as the first one and nothing lost to rounding. Free, nothing to sign up for.
Whatever is left
| Deposit | £600 |
| Balance on completionbalance | £1,800 |
| Adds up to | £2,400 |
The final payment is whatever is left, never a percentage — so the stages always add up to the job exactly, to the penny.
A deposit is not profit taken early
It is the reason you are not lending a customer the cost of their own materials for six weeks. Work out what you have to spend before any money comes in — materials, hire, a subcontractor’s first week — and make sure stage one covers it. On most domestic work that lands somewhere between 20% and 33%.
If the deposit is smaller than what you lay out, a job going quiet halfway through costs you money rather than time.
Tie every stage to something visible
“Materials on site”, “first fix complete”, “boiler commissioned” — a customer can see each of those and knows the payment is due. “30% at week two” invites a conversation about whether week two was reached, which is a conversation nobody wins.
And keep the final payment worth something. A job whose last stage is £150 has nothing holding it to a finish, which is how snags take four months.
The last payment is whatever is left
Percentages do not add up. 20% + 40% + 40% of £999.99 comes to a penny more than the job, and a customer whose invoices total more than their quote does not conclude there is a rounding bug — they conclude they are being overcharged, and they are right to ask.
So the final stage absorbs it. Every schedule on this page adds up to the total exactly, which is the same rule TaskMyJob applies when it raises the invoices.
Not on a CIS invoice
A share of a whole job carries no split between labour and materials, and a CIS deduction is on labour only. Deducting from a percentage would be a guess at somebody’s tax, so subcontract invoices state what was actually done.
A note on what this is
A guide, not advice. Whether a deposit is refundable, and what happens if a stage is paid late, is what your terms say — and they should say it before anybody pays.
Built by TaskMyJob, which raises each stage as its own invoice in order, using this same rule. More free tools: late payment interest, retention, or all of them.