Glossary
Agreed fee
The total amount a client has agreed to pay for a piece of work — the figure every payment and balance is measured against.
What it means
The agreed fee is the price settled between you and the client before or at the start of the work. It is sometimes called the contract value, the project fee or the total fee.
It is the anchor of the whole billing record. Without it, payments are just amounts arriving with nothing to measure them against, and there is no way to say whether a client is up to date.
The most common mistake is recording the fee late — reconstructing it from invoices after the work is finished. Memory of a number agreed verbally decays quickly, and it tends to decay towards whatever the client remembers. Writing it down at the moment it is settled is the cheapest insurance in client billing.
When scope changes, renegotiate and update the recorded fee rather than keeping the original figure and remembering the variation separately. A fee that does not match the agreement makes every balance derived from it wrong.
Recording the fee at the right moment
A photographer quotes $35,000 for an event and the client accepts over a phone call. The fee is recorded that day, against the client and the event.
The client later asks for an extra half-day of coverage. Rather than noting the addition separately, the photographer renegotiates to $45,000 and updates the recorded fee.
When $30,000 has been received, the balance reads $15,000 — correct against the revised agreement, with nothing held in anyone's head.
Illustrative example. Names and amounts are made up.
How this works in Umikflow
- The agreed fee is set when a client is added, and can be edited if the scope changes.
- Amounts are entered with Indian digit grouping as you type, so $1,00,000 reads correctly.
- The fee appears on reminders and invoices alongside the paid and outstanding figures.