Creating an Order Manually

Most orders arrive on their own through your order forms when an agent books online. But some jobs don’t fit a form — a phone booking, a repeat client you know by heart, or a one-off that needs a custom price. For those, you create the order by hand. It’s a single flow that captures everything the shoot needs at once.

What you’ll capture

Everything lives in one order, built in one pass:

• Client — attach an existing client, or capture a new contact inline with a name (and optionally email, phone, and company). New contacts become client records automatically, so you never enter someone twice. The order picks up the client’s company too.
• Property — the address, an optional property size (used if you price by size or tier; the field is labelled in your area unit, such as Size (sq ft)), and access instructions for getting in.
• Line items — pull services and packages from your catalog at their catalog price. Set a quantity, or pick a variation or tier where the service offers them. You can override a catalog item’s price for this one order, or add a one-off custom line with your own name and price.
• Sessions — one or more scheduled shoots, each with a start and end time, an optional assigned photographer, and its own travel fee.

You can also leave the order completely unscheduled. The items stay unscheduled until you add a session on the calendar later — handy when the client hasn’t picked a date yet.

Starting from the calendar saves a step: drag across an empty time on the calendar, choose Create order, and the New order page opens with that time already set on the first session, along with the photographer when you dragged in their lane of the day view.

Manual orders don’t collect booking answers — those only come from clients filling in your order form. Put anything you learn on the phone in the order’s notes instead.

When the client has their own prices

If the client — or their company — is on a price list, a Pricing chip with the list’s name appears under the Customer field, and the catalog is priced for them: services and packages come in at their list price, and private items on their list become available to add. Change the client and the order is re-priced for the new one. Items the new client can’t book are taken off, with a note like “1 item removed — They are not available to this client. Everything else was re-priced for them.” Prices you typed in by hand are left alone.

Discount and travel fee

Add an order-level discount as either a percentage or a flat amount. It applies to the item subtotal before any travel fee.

The travel fee is set per session, since each session is a separate trip. Once a session has a photographer, its Travel fee field fills in from that photographer’s travel settings and is marked auto — type over it to charge something else for that trip. Before anyone is assigned, the sidebar shows the cheapest eligible photographer’s fee as a “from” estimate. The Travel fee row in the Pricing panel adds up the sessions’ trips.

While the order has no scheduled session, you can instead enter one travel fee for the whole order in the Pricing panel. As soon as you give a session a time, the per-session fees take over.

More than one session

An order can hold more than one shoot — a daytime shoot plus a twilight return trip, for example. Line items attach to the first session automatically, and you can assign specific items to specific sessions. Each session carries its own travel fee, so a return trip is charged as a trip of its own. Once the order exists, manage its sessions on the calendar like any other.

Notes

Attach three kinds of notes: internal notes private to you and your team, client-facing notes the client will see, and access instructions for the shoot. Use them to carry the context that doesn’t fit a field.

Sending the confirmation and collecting payment

The sidebar holds the switches that decide what happens when you click Save order. Each one only appears when it applies:

• Email confirmation to client — send a booking confirmation when the order is created (details below).
• Require payment before download — the client must pay the balance before they can download the media. It starts on or off to match the client’s payment timing, and if the client has their own setting, the card says so: “This client is set to pay upfront”, “pay on delivery”, or “invoice”. See when clients pay.
• Apply to this order — shown when the client has account credit, with “Account credit available: $X”. Tick it to use their credit on this order.
• Send payment request — email the client a payment link as soon as the order is created. It appears when your plan includes online payments, you have permission to manage invoices, and something is still due after any credit.

When you create the order, you can send the primary client an order confirmation. It fires once, after the whole order exists, and only sends if the primary client has an email on file. The email includes the schedule, address, and services, plus an optional personal note. When the primary client is the order’s sole payer, their copy also carries pricing and a billing document — the order’s live invoice if one has been issued, a receipt once the order is paid, otherwise a quote. You can also send it later — the one thing you can’t do is send a confirmation for a cancelled order.

What happens next

A new order enters your intake stage — Planning, unless you’ve renamed or customized your stages — and behaves like every other order from there. You can edit items, reschedule, or adjust the details at any time. For a map of the stages ahead, see the order lifecycle.

The client you attach here is the order’s primary — its listing agent. If the job involves more people — a co-listing agent, the seller who wants the photos, a billing contact at the brokerage — add them once the order exists, from the order sidebar’s Clients section. Agents, sellers, and billing contacts covers the roles and what each person receives.

Go deeper

• Services and pricing models — set up the catalog the order’s line items are pulled from.
• Packages — bundle services so a common shoot is one line instead of five.
• When clients pay — payment timing — decide whether a manual booking is paid upfront, on delivery, or invoiced.
• Assigning shoots to your team — hand a session to the photographer who’s actually covering it.
• Calendar and availability — where the sessions you create land, and what keeps them bookable.