Making one
Payments → Create draft. Pick a family from your records, choose the terms, and add lines with a description, a quantity and a unit price. A draft is a real saved record from the moment you create it, not something living in the browser until you send it.
An Owner or a Manager can do this. Nobody else can create, send or void an invoice, and the server refuses rather than hiding the button and hoping.
Sending it, and the number
Sending is the moment the invoice becomes a document your customer holds, so that is when it gets its human-readable number. Numbers are handed out one at a time and never reused, and sending the same invoice again does not burn a second one.
Every sent invoice also gets its own page your customer can open without signing in, and you can copy that link from the invoice row. A draft has no such page — the link only works once the invoice has actually been sent.
The email is off until you turn it on
Sending an invoice does not email anybody by default. That is deliberate rather than broken: plenty of businesses would rather send the link themselves, in their own words, from their own mailbox. Until you turn it on, copy the pay link and send it however you like.
You turn it on in Settings → Invoices and billing. The Payments screen says which of the two you are on, so you are never guessing whether a customer heard from you.
Whose account the money lands in
Yours, directly. A card payment is charged on your own connected Stripe account and settles into your Stripe balance; Sitterz takes a small percentage of each charge as its fee and is never in the flow of the money itself.
Sitterz also never moves your money out. Payouts are Stripe paying you from your own balance on your own schedule — the Payouts screen is a read-only mirror of what Stripe reports, with a link out to Stripe for anything that actually moves funds. There is no payout fee.
Card numbers are collected by Stripe in their own frame and never reach a Sitterz server, which is also why we cannot read a customer's card back to you.
Money that arrived some other way
Take a payment records cash, a cheque, a bank transfer or a card terminal against an invoice. It goes in your own books with no Sitterz fee, because Sitterz did not process it, and it keeps who logged it and when the money actually arrived.
A part payment leaves the invoice open for the rest. Recording more than is owed is refused unless you explicitly say to bank the difference, which puts it on the family's account as a credit.
Refunds happen in Stripe
There is no refund button in Sitterz, and you should not go looking for one. Refunds and disputes are handled in your Stripe dashboard, and Sitterz reads the outcome back so your Refunds and disputes screen stays accurate.
A partial refund is carried as a partial: the invoice stays paid and the refunded amount sits alongside it. A chargeback is decided by the cardholder's bank on evidence you submit in Stripe — Sitterz records how it ended and does not take a view on it.
Billing a whole period at once
Bill a period rolls each family's completed bookings from the last full week or month into one invoice each. It is safe to press twice — anything already billed is skipped rather than charged again — and it tells you how many it made and how many it passed over.