The new billing features in Rehab Guru give you a much clearer way to raise invoices, take payments through Stripe, and keep track of what has been paid, what is outstanding, and what has been refunded. This guide walks you through connecting Stripe, configuring your payment settings, and managing invoices day to day.
Step 1: Connecting Your Stripe Account
To get started, go to Business details, then Payment settings. From here you can choose how proceeds are collected:
One central business account - all team members' proceeds land in a single Stripe account. This is the recommended option for employed teams, as it minimises invoicing complexity and keeps everything central for analytics. Sole practitioners should also use this option.
Each team member's account - use this if every team member does their own billing and is paid for the appointments they run. As the team administrator, you can also connect your business account as a fallback, which is used for any team member who does not have their own Stripe account.
When you click Connect, you are taken to Stripe to complete the connection. If you are already logged in, you can connect your account there.
Connecting your Stripe account from Business Details > Payment Settings
Note that each Stripe Connect connection requires a fresh account, although that account can be populated from your existing Stripe account and still sits within the parent account. Stripe will explain which of your accounts are eligible and whether you need to create a new one - this only takes a moment as it inherits the information from the parent account.
Stripe connection in Rehab Guru, showing payouts and charges enabled.
Once the connection is complete, you are returned to Rehab Guru. You should see your Stripe connection showing charges and payouts enabled, which confirms your account is fully authenticated and verified. As part of this, Stripe carries out Know-Your-Business checks and may ask for the directors and shareholders of the business.
Under Preferred Currency, you have the ability to choose from over 100 supported currencies for invoicing and payments.
Step 2: Configuring Your Payment Settings
Navigating to the new Billing section.
Navigate to the new Billing section, where you can configure a few additional settings:
Default payment terms - set how many days customers have to pay (for example, 14 days).
Invoice numbering - if you're migrating from another system, set your invoice numbering to continue on from your existing sequence instead of starting at 1.
Managed payment methods - add the methods you accept, such as cash and Stripe. Stripe is always available once connected, but if you use another point-of-sale system such as Square or SumUp, you can add it here and reconcile those payments manually.
Tax rates - set up your tax rates here, including the percentage and whether they are inclusive or exclusive.
Default invoice information - add default invoice details such as bank information or a different address, or set a default third-party recipient (for example an insurer) to bill by default.
Step 3: Take Payments & Refunds
Creating an Invoice
From your Diary page, select an Appointment, then click Create Invoice.
Creating an invoice directly from the Diary page.
Or, on the Billing tab within the Client's profile, click Create Invoice.
Creating an invoice from within the Client's profile.
You can then either choose a service (an arbitrary appointment type) or attach an actual appointment from your list, and you can invoice for any number of appointments at once.
Choosing a specific appointment, or a Service (arbitrary appointment)
If you are using per-member billing, the payee is automatically set to the person delivering the appointment. If you select someone else, a warning appears noting that the payee differs from the appointment practitioner. This warning does not show when using combined business billing. Most of the time the payee will be the practitioner delivering the appointment, but per-member billing gives you the option to decide who the proceeds go to.
Warning message that payee practitioner is not the same as the practitioner who delivered the appointment.
You have the ability to select whether you'd like a Payment Link to be sent within the invoice, or not.
Once ready, you can Approve and Send the invoice, or save it as a Draft. After sending, the open invoice appears in your list where you can preview it. At this stage no payments are recorded against it yet.
Approving and sending the invoice
To bill a third party such as an insurer for a specific invoice, open the client's Billing settings tab and add their name, email address and any reference details, then tick the box to include this on the invoice.
Changing the third-party invoicing settings in a Client Profile
Recording and Allocating Payments
It helps to separate two concepts: invoicing, which represents the payments that are required, and payments, which represent money actually received.
Payments can be added in several ways. If a customer pays in person by cash, or through another method such as SumUp, you can record it manually as a credit against their account.
Navigate to Billing > Settings, where you can add multiple payment sources and accumulate a payment on account.
Adding different payment methods.
If a client has credit on their account, you can allocate it against an outstanding invoice, and Rehab Guru can do this automatically. Once allocated, the credit is used up and the invoice is marked as paid. It is worth refreshing the page to make sure everything is up to date.
When allocating credit, you can split it across more than one invoice - rather than paying off a single invoice in full.
Allocating credit across multiple appointments.
Taking Online Payments and Issuing Refunds
When you send an invoice to a client, they receive an email containing a PDF and, if you have enabled it, a payment link.
Clicking Pay online takes them to the Stripe-hosted payment portal, branded with your own details, where they can pay by card or Apple Pay depending on what you have configured in Stripe.
How clients pay via the Pay Online link in their invoice.
Once the client pays, the invoice updates to show it as Paid. If it does not appear straight away, refresh the Invoices page or view the history to see the Stripe event. The payment comes straight through from Stripe, is allocated to the invoice, and the balance owed drops accordingly.
Viewing the Invoice History - in this example, the practitioner has manually marked the invoice as paid, as shown in the history.
There is also the ability to bulk Update Payment Status for past Appointments, using the filters to refine your search.
Bulk updating Payment Status for your past appointments.
You can also issue a refund from the Payments section. When you refund an amount, the invoice is reopened because there is no longer a payment allocated against it, and its status changes from paid to open.
Issuing a refund from a payment.
Step 4: Deposits & Invoicing
Booking Deposits from the Booking Portal
Appointments booked through the booking portal now handle deposits more clearly.
When a client books and pays a deposit (for example, a refundable £1 deposit by card), the booking comes through with a linked invoice showing the deposit as paid. Previously this would have been an arbitrary payment that was hard to track.
Now an invoice is raised against the appointment, the deposit is recorded against it, and the invoices page clearly shows the invoice as open with the remaining amount still to be paid. You can then send that invoice to collect the balance, making it easy to see what is a deposit and what is fully paid.
Manually Marking an Appointment as Paid
If you're not using the invoicing workflow, you can still mark an appointment as paid manually.
Go to the client's Appointments tab and set the payment status to Paid.
Manually changing the appointment Payment Status
Doing this shows a warning, because manually marking an appointment as paid bypasses invoicing, so you lose the audit trail and it won't feed into financial analytics. Where possible, the recommended approach is to raise an invoice and record a payment against it instead.
Step 5: Bulk Invoicing, Reminders and the Dashboard
The main Dashboard page gives you (as a team Admin) an overview of your billing, including total revenue, average time to pay, and your most popular appointment types.
The main Dashboard, showing the Billing widgets for easy action.
From the dashboard you can now raise invoices in bulk - for example, selecting all appointments within the last 30 days and approving and sending them together. At the end of the day you could bulk-invoice everything at once.
Bulk invoicing from the Dashboard.
You can also send reminders with clear visibility of when each invoice was last chased, so only overdue, unchased invoices are shown.
Sending payment reminders directly from the Dashboard.
Opening invoices takes you through to the billing page, where you can adjust the filters to show all open statuses and see exactly what is owed. From here you can take actions such as sending, updating status, or writing off bad debts.
Navigating to Invoices from the Dashboard.
Setting a Cancellation Refund Policy
While not directly part of the billing feature, there are new cancellation refund policy options you may find useful.
Navigate to Appointments > Portal Settings, where you can set tiered refunds based on how far in advance an appointment is cancelled.
Adjusting your tiered Refund Policies.
For example, you might offer a 100% refund if cancelled more than 48 hours before, 50% if cancelled at least 24 hours before, and no refund within 24 hours.