Retainers raised each period or by billing run
How recurring fees from signed engagement letters become invoices in Achekam, how the partner-authorised billing run works, and how clients pay.
By Achekam · · 4 min read · For Accountants & audit firms in South Africa, Nigeria, Kenya
For many practices the monthly fee is the business. Bookkeeping, payroll, VAT returns, the secretarial retainer: small amounts, every month, from dozens of clients. When they are billed on time and paid on time, nobody thinks about them. When one is missed for a quarter, or issued at last year's fee, it turns into an awkward conversation and a catch-up invoice nobody wants to receive.
Recurring fees fail in predictable ways. The fee agreed in the engagement letter never makes it into the billing system. The invoice is raised, but nobody checks it before it goes. Or the client would happily pay but has no easy way to do it.
This is how Achekam handles each of those steps, and where the firm still has work to do itself.
Where a retainer comes from
In Achekam a retainer starts with a signed engagement letter. When the letter is signed, Achekam turns the lead into a client, activates a service for each quotation line that is mapped to the firm's services, and drafts an invoice without issuing it. Recurring lines go on a schedule, and those scheduled fees are what appear under Retainers.
Two details matter. A quotation line that is not mapped to a service is recorded as unmapped, so it will not become a recurring charge until someone deals with it. And no screen yet shows everything a signed contract created, or lets staff retry a step that failed. After a new client signs, it is worth checking that each expected service is active and that the retainer has appeared, rather than assuming it has.
How the proposal and letter get to that point is covered in from proposal to signed engagement letter.
Two ways to raise them
Under Retainers there are two routes from schedule to invoice.
Each period as a draft. Staff raise the period's invoice as a draft, check it, and issue it. This suits firms that want a person to look at every recurring invoice, for example because fees are often adjusted for extra work in the month.
The daily billing run. A partner authorises the daily billing run, which issues the due retainers. This suits firms with many clients on stable fees, where reviewing each invoice adds little.
Either way, the invoices land in the firm's receivables ledger on the server, beside receipts, credit notes and statements of account. The firm's client billing controls still apply; they can, for example, require a second issuer for an invoice above an amount the firm sets.
What Achekam does not collect
Achekam does not collect recurring fees by debit order or by charging a card. There is no mandate to load and no card on file. If the firm collects by debit order today, that arrangement continues through its bank or collection provider, and the receipts are recorded against the invoices.
This is worth stating plainly to clients moving onto a new billing routine: the invoice arrives from the firm, and the client chooses when and how to pay it.
Pay links on the invoice
What Achekam can do is make paying easy. A firm can e-mail an invoice with a pay link, through which the client pays by a gateway the firm has configured with its own keys, such as PayFast, Ozow, Peach Payments, Stripe, Paystack, Flutterwave, M-Pesa or Pesapal, or by EFT. The settings are under SETTINGS > Integrations & Webhooks > Payment Gateways & Checkout.
A few rules keep the ledger honest:
- With no gateway configured, there is no pay link.
- A payment is recorded only from the gateway's verified notification, a status query, or a person capturing it.
- Achekam is not the merchant of record; the money goes to the firm's own account with its provider.
For Kenyan firms there is an extra option. A firm can register its M-Pesa paybill or till, so that a payment quoting an invoice number is matched when exactly one open invoice carries that number. Anything else waits for a person to allocate. M-Pesa refunds are done in the M-Pesa portal. Safaricom's page on the M-PESA Paybill describes the service itself: collecting customer payments against an account number, with real-time reports and statements.
Telling the client what they are paying for
A recurring fee is easier to collect when the client remembers what it covers. From a client's Billing tab in Client 360, staff can issue a numbered statement of the services the client buys and their fees, as a PDF on the firm's letterhead, and e-mail it. Statements of account can also be downloaded as a PDF or e-mailed from the receivables ledger.
Sending the services statement once a year, before fees are reviewed, heads off a good share of "what is this charge for?" queries.
A routine for the start of each month
- Check Retainers for any new clients signed last month, and confirm their services are active and nothing was left unmapped.
- Decide which clients' retainers go through the partner-authorised run and which are raised as drafts for review.
- Bill any agreed extra work separately from WIP, with its time approved first.
- Make sure each invoice carries a pay link where the firm has a gateway configured.
- Mid-month, review unpaid recurring invoices and send statements where needed.
Extra work that does not fit the retainer is billed from WIP instead, with any adjustments recorded as described in writing WIP up, down or off.
If your recurring fees still live in a spreadsheet, start with one team's clients: confirm each signed letter produced a retainer, choose the billing route, and set up a gateway so the next invoice carries a pay link.
General guidance only, not advice on your own circumstances. Tax and payroll rules change: check the current position with the authority or your adviser.
