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Chasing money after a job’s already done is one of the most avoidable sources of stress in running a workshop. Big jobs, custom parts on order, a customer you’ve never met before…
All of it gets easier the moment you build in one simple habit: get paid something before you start.
That’s now built straight into Workshop Software.
What’s new
You can take a deposit against any open invoice or quote, using any payment method, cash, cheque, card, EFTPOS, or straight through a WorkshopPay terminal.
Here’s everything that comes with it:
- Refund a deposit at any time, including terminal deposits.
- Multiple deposits on the same invoice, each one tracked independently.
- Deposits follow the job. Take a deposit on a quote and it carries through automatically to the booking and the job card. Delete the booking, and it returns to the quote.
- Automatic accounting sync. The deposit is linked to the customer’s invoice from the moment you take it. When that invoice syncs to Xero, MYOB or QuickBooks Online, the deposit goes with it as part of the same transaction, so there’s no separate payment entry to create or process on top.
Why it matters
A deposit does more than protect your cash flow, though it does plenty of that too.
It’s the difference between ordering a custom part with confidence and hoping the customer follows through. It’s a lower-stress way to handle bigger jobs, where the size of the invoice alone can make a customer hesitate.
And it’s one more small signal of professionalism at exactly the moment a new or uncertain customer is deciding whether they trust you.
No double handling
Because the deposit is tied to the invoice from the start, there’s nothing to double up on. No separate payment to create, no manual matching later, no guessing whether a deposit and an invoice actually belong together.
That matters more than it sounds. Duplicate or missing payment records are one of the quieter ways bookkeeping goes wrong, and they’re the kind of thing that only surfaces weeks later when the numbers don’t add up.
Keeping the deposit and invoice connected from the start avoids that entirely, and gives you a clearer, more accurate view of what each customer actually owes at any given moment.
Reconciling deposits just got easier too
Two new reports come with this release:
- Payment Reconciliation (formerly Sales by Payment Methods) now includes deposit income, so every payment, deposits included, reconciles in one place.
- Xero Deposit Cleanup, for Xero users specifically. Xero’s API doesn’t allow prepayments to be deleted directly, so if you edit or remove a deposit inside Workshop Software, this report lists it for you to tidy up on the Xero side.
One thing to set up first
Before deposits will sync to your accounting package, there’s a single setting to check: your Customer Deposit Account, under your Xero, MYOB or QuickBooks integration settings.
Until that’s set, deposits won’t push through, though your existing invoice and payment sync isn’t affected either way, it keeps working exactly as it does now.
For the full step-by-step, see our guide to setting up Customer Deposits.
