Recurring Fees

Melissa Gunn
Melissa Gunn
  • Updated

Need to outline a recurring charge in your proposal? Here’s a quick guide on adding recurring fees to your pricing tables.

What are Recurring Fees?

Not all fees are “one and done”. Often, you’ll need to outline recurring charges, such as:

  • Subscriptions

  • Retainers

  • License renewals

  • Structured payments

  • Flexible add-on services

The list goes on. If you need to outline fees to your customer according to a billing cycle, use recurring fees.

Recurring fees are line items that include a time frame (hourly, monthly or yearly). Even if your line item is a unit/quantity fee, a flat fee, has been modified with a discount, an editable quantity or has been transformed into an optional fee, you can still indicate that it’s a recurring charge.

Adding Recurring Fees

The following steps assume you already understand how to add line items. If not, check out our Adding/Moving/Deleting Rows article.

Starting in your table, expand the three-dot menu to open the Line Item Options menu to the right of the line item you want to modify:

Next, click Recurring in the Line Item Options menu to open the Recurring menu:

Next, in the Recurring menu, adjust the settings to setup your recurring fee according to your needs:

Recurring toggle

Enables or disables your line item as a recurring fee.

Per (Time frame)

Lets you choose the billing period (hourly, monthly or yearly).

Include 1st Payment

Include the first installment as an up-front payment (add the line item to the total as a one-time fee).

Show in Recurring Details

Include the line item and it’s one-time fee to the Recurring details panel at the bottom of the table’s footer.

Your line item will automatically update as you adjust your recurring fee settings. Just click anywhere on the page to close the menu once you’ve finalized your changes.

Show in Recurring Details

Activating this option will add a summary of your recurring fee to the Recurring Details panel in the table footer:

This highlights the total value and the amount included as a one-time payment for each recurring fee in your table.

You can show/hide the Recurring Details panel by clicking the cog at the bottom left corner of the table to open the Summary Options menu:

Click Recurring to open the Recurring Details menu:

Then, turn on the toggle to display the Recurring Details panel, or turn it off to hide it from view:

Best Practices

Setting a per-unit/seat recurring fee

If your product has a per-unit/seat structure (like ours), then use a unit/quantity row type for your recurring fee. This lets you outline exactly how much your customer is paying per billing period for each item by adding a recurring label to both the “Price” and “Subtotal” columns:

Setting an overall recurring fee

If your recurring fee doesn’t rely on a number of units, you can ignore the “Price” and “Quantity” columns by using a flat fee row to make only the “Subtotal” column recurring:

Outlining an "estimated billable timeframe" fee

If you’re outlining an amount of work (ex. 12 hours for a bartender), recurring fees will get confusing:

In cases like these, it’s better to explain your pricing with just a plain old unit/quantity row:

This removes the timeframe label in the subtotal, improving the clarity and readability of the estimated charge.

Viewing and Tracking Your Recurring Fees

Once you add recurring fees to your pricing, you can track them in your account:

in the editor,

in the proposal preview,

in the document’s Snapshot,

…and in your Pipeline