Practical guide

Align service periods, invoices and unfinished work

Last materially reviewed 2026-09-19

Quick answerA paid invoice, a service entitlement and an accepted deliverable are three different records.
What to know

Name the three dates

Record the billing date, the service period and the acceptance date separately. A client may pay before production begins, approve work after a period ends or pause a service midway through a cycle. If every event is described as renewed, staff cannot reliably explain what is owed. ManyRequests supports recurring-service configuration, but the agency still needs a clear account of which dates govern capacity, requests and completed outputs.

What to know

Write an ordinary boundary example

For a fictional monthly package, a brief arrives on the final day of the period and is not complete. Decide whether it belongs to the old entitlement, waits for clarification or requires a new commitment. Do not invent a rule after the client has paid. Put the agreed handling into onboarding and the service description. This example is an operational prompt, not a ready-made clause for a binding client agreement.

What to know

Preserve work rather than resetting it

At renewal, carry the unfinished request’s identity, current version and unresolved decision forward. A new invoice does not require a duplicate production ticket. If the underlying scope changes, link the new agreement to the original work. This helps the team distinguish a continuing task from genuinely additional work and avoids treating a month-end reporting exercise as permission to restart or silently close a client’s request.

What to know

Reconcile a small sample regularly

Pick one completed job, one ongoing job and one paused service. Check whether the invoice, entitlement and production state tell a consistent story. Investigate discrepancies before broad automation. The objective is not to build a parallel accounting system in a spreadsheet; it is to discover where your process relies on ambiguous labels. Once the boundary works, give clients a concise explanation of what renews and what happens to work already in progress.

Continue when useful

Next: What happens to queued work when a subscription pauses?

Separate the payment pause, the client’s access and the agency’s obligation to unfinished work.

Open What happens to queued work when a subscription pauses? →

Sources used for this page

These records support the facts and comparisons above. Merchant-controlled records are labelled so you can separate product claims from independent evidence.

  1. ManyRequests recurring service configuration — Merchant documentation · help.manyrequests.com · Merchant-controlled · checked 2026-09-19
  2. ManyRequests service pricing configurations — Merchant documentation · help.manyrequests.com · Merchant-controlled · checked 2026-09-19
  3. ManyRequests subscription pause conditions — Merchant documentation · help.manyrequests.com · Merchant-controlled · checked 2026-09-19