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Set up customer tipping

Turn on tips, choose where your customers are asked, set the amounts and the wording, and send a tip link for work that's already been paid for. The whole setup lives on one page and takes about five minutes.

Before you start

You need Stripe connected. Tips are card payments, so they run through the same Stripe account your invoice payments do. Until that's done, the Tip Settings page shows Connect Stripe to turn on tips with a Set up Stripe button instead of the settings — there's nothing to configure yet.

1Turn on tipping

Two decisions here, and they're not the same decision: whether you accept tips at all, and where your customers get asked for one.

  1. From Tools, open Tip Settings.

  2. Under Master switch, switch on Accept tips from customers. This is the setting that decides whether a tip can be taken at all. With it off, no tip option appears anywhere and nothing is charged.

  3. Under Where tips appear, choose your surfaces. Each one decides only whether we ask there:

    • Invoices — the tip buttons a customer sees while paying an invoice online, plus the tip invitation on the page they land on right after paying. On by default.
    • Receipts — the tip invitation in the receipt emails we send after a payment. On by default. Worth knowing: with this on, a receipt goes out after a payment even where you'd otherwise switched receipt emails off, because the receipt is what carries the tip link. Switch this off and those sends stop again.
    • Customer portal — a tip link inside the signed-in portal, on paid invoices and on completed jobs you charged directly. Off by default — it's a new place to ask, so you opt in rather than out.

  4. Click Save Tip Settings.

Switching a surface off doesn't cancel links you've already sent

This is deliberate. If you switch Receipts off, we stop putting a tip invitation in new receipt emails — but a tip link already sitting in a customer's inbox keeps working. To stop accepting tips entirely, switch off Accept tips from customers. That's the only setting that refuses new tips everywhere.

How to check it worked

The Customer preview panel on the right of the page redraws as you change settings and shows the real tip form your customers will see. For a live check, open the pay link on any open invoice — the tip buttons appear above the card form.

Turning tips off for one invoice

You don't have to choose account-wide. Open any invoice for editing and use the Tips dropdown:

  • Use account default — follows your Tip Settings. This is the starting value, shown as (Using default).
  • Tips on for this invoice — asks even if your account setting is off.
  • Tips off for this invoice — never asks on this one. Useful for commercial accounts and anyone who'd find the ask out of place.

One thing this can't do: force tips on without Stripe connected. The Stripe requirement isn't overridable.

2Set your amounts and wording

All of this is on the same Tip Settings page, below the switches. It's greyed out until Accept tips from customers is on.

  1. Under Tip options → Suggested amounts, set your three percentages. They start at 10%, 15% and 20%. Each must be between 1 and 100.

    They're shown to customers in ascending order regardless of which box you type them in, and two identical percentages collapse into one button — a customer can't tell two identical chips apart.

  2. Decide whether to Allow a custom amount. On, customers get a Custom button and can enter their own figure. Off, they choose from your three percentages only. On by default.

  3. Decide whether to Suggest a tip amount by default. On, the tip page and the portal tip window open with your middle percentage already selected. Off, they open at $0 with nothing chosen and the send button disabled. Off by default — tipping stays strictly opt-in unless you change it.

  4. Set Prompt display on the pay page if you want a quieter ask. On, the tip section starts collapsed behind a chevron the customer taps, inside the larger pay form. It has no effect on the standalone tip page, where the tip is the whole page.

  5. Under Prompts, write your Tip prompt — the line customers read above the buttons. Up to 120 characters. Leave it blank and it reads Add optional tip.

  6. Optionally add a Thank-you message, up to 160 characters, shown after a tip goes through. Leave it blank to show nothing.

  7. Click Save Tip Settings. Discard changes puts everything back if you'd rather not.

Where the thank-you message actually appears

Only on the standalone tip page — the one a customer opens from a tip link after the work is already paid for. A tip added while paying an invoice lands on the normal paid receipt instead, which doesn't carry it. If you write one and never see it, that's why.

How to check it worked

Watch the Customer preview panel as you type. It's the genuine tip form component priced against a sample invoice total, not a mock-up, so what you see there is what your customer gets.

3Ask for a tip after payment

Most tips are added while a customer is paying. But plenty of work gets settled before anyone thinks of it — a card on file charged automatically, an invoice you took in cash and marked paid, a job that went well and got a text of thanks instead. Those can still be sent a tip link.

What can be tipped

Item Can be tipped when
An invoice, while it's still open Any time the customer pays it online — the tip rides along on the same charge, so there's no separate step and nothing has to have been paid first
An invoice, after it's paid Its status is Paid — however it was settled, including by hand — via a separate tip link
A job Its card charge has completed

The two invoice rows are genuinely different paths, and only the second one waits for Paid. The rest of this section is about that second path — the separate link. Tipping during payment is covered in Turn on tipping and needs nothing extra from you.

For the separate link, the invoice or job must not have been tipped already, and your account must be accepting tips. A $0 invoice can't be tipped — there's nothing there to be grateful for.

  1. Let the receipt do it. With Receipts switched on, the tip invitation is already in the receipt emails going out after every payment. Nothing further to do — this is the path most tips arrive by.

  2. Or let them find it in the portal. Switch on Customer portal and signed-in customers get a Leave a tip option on paid invoices and completed jobs, with a Send tip button. It sends no new email or notification — it's there when they happen to look.

  3. Or send the link yourself. Every eligible paid invoice and completed job has its own tip page you can send by text or message.

One tip per invoice

Once a tip has been left, the link stops asking — it tells the customer their tip is already in. That holds even while a tip is still clearing, so a customer who taps twice is never charged twice.

How to check it worked

Tips appear as their own figure on your Revenue report for whatever period you're viewing, counting both tips added during payment and tips left on a tip link. They're reported on top of revenue rather than folded into it — and they're deliberately kept out of invoice totals, so nothing about your invoice figures or balances shifts when a tip lands.

More about tipping: Customer Tipping