On a long job, waiting until the end to get paid means funding somebody else's rewire out of your own account for six weeks. The answer is to agree the payment schedule up front, on the quote, before anyone has lifted a spanner — so the customer signs the schedule at the same time as they sign the price.
Setting the schedule
Build the quote as normal, then look under Payment Terms:
- Tick Take a deposit if you want money on acceptance, and set it as a percentage or an amount.
- Tick Split the rest into stages.
- For each stage, type what it's for — First fix complete, Materials on site, Second fix — and what it's worth, either a percentage of the job or a set amount.
- Underneath, Mucka shows you Balance on completion: whatever's left after everything above.
You can have up to eight stages before the balance. If the stages add up to more than the job, Mucka tells you so and won't save it.
The balance is never a number you type
That's deliberate. If a customer signs off extra work halfway through, the job gets bigger — and a balance you'd typed in at the start would now be wrong. Because the balance is simply "whatever's left", it corrects itself when the total moves, and nobody has to remember to go back and change it.
What the customer sees
If you haven't written your own payment terms, Mucka writes them for you from the schedule and prints them on the quote:
25% deposit when you accept, then 50% at first fix complete, and the balance on completion.
If you have written your own terms and they mention a figure that isn't in your schedule — the terms say 50% deposit but the schedule says 25% — Mucka points it out and offers to use the schedule's wording instead. It won't rewrite what you typed without asking.
Raising each stage
Nothing gets invoiced on its own. Only you know the first fix is actually finished, so Mucka waits for you.
Open the quote and you'll see the Payment schedule on it. Next to each stage that hasn't been billed yet is a Raise this stage button. Tap it and Mucka raises that stage as a proper invoice, due straight away, with its own reference number and its own pay link.
The deposit is the one exception: that one goes out by itself the moment the customer accepts and signs, because their signature is the go-ahead.
The final invoice
When the job's done, raise the final invoice from the quote as normal. Everything you've already billed comes off it as its own line:
Less deposit — invoiced INV-104, paid 12 Aug 2026 -£500.00 Less first fix complete — invoiced INV-110, paid 2 Sep 2026 -£1,000.00
So the customer can see exactly what they've already paid, and the total at the bottom is only what's still owed. Nobody pays twice, and nobody has to take your word for it.
Things worth knowing
- The VAT works out right. Each stage invoice charges VAT on its own amount, and the deductions come off before VAT — so the VAT across all the invoices adds up to the VAT on the whole job, not a penny more.
- Once a stage is invoiced, the schedule locks. You can't reshuffle a schedule you've already started billing, because the invoice you sent refers to a milestone that has to keep existing. Raise an ordinary invoice if you need something outside the plan.
- Stage payments aren't available on CIS subcontractor work yet, for the same reason deposits aren't — a card payment doesn't record the CIS deduction, and wrong CIS numbers cost you far more than the convenience is worth.
- Your end-of-day summary counts them. If you've stages sitting unbilled, Mucka tells you in the evening: "2 stage payments are still to bill, worth £3,500."
Asking Mucka to do it
You can just say it:
"Quote the Henderson job at £8,000 — 25% deposit, 25% at first fix, rest at the end."
Mucka will set the schedule up on the quote. It will never invent a split you didn't ask for, and it will never add stages to a quote you didn't mention them on — if you say you want stages but not how they break down, it'll ask.