Managing an Order

An order isn’t frozen the moment it’s booked. Whether it came in through an order form or you created it by hand, you can keep editing it as the job takes shape — scope changes, the client adds a twilight shoot, you agree on a discount. Everything below happens on the order itself.

Editing line items

Line items are the services and packages the client booked, each with a price. Services you add after booking are priced for the order’s client, so a client on a price list gets their list price. After booking you can add, remove, or update them:

• Add items from your catalog, or drop in a one-off custom line with your own name and price for anything that isn’t in your catalog.
• Change quantities or variations on an item, and override the catalog price when a job needs a special rate.
• Remove items that are no longer part of the shoot.

The order total recalculates as you go, so the client always sees what they’ll actually owe.

Discounts and travel fees

Apply an order-level discount — either a percentage or a flat amount — to the item subtotal. The discount comes off before any travel fee is added.

Travel is charged per session, because each session is its own trip. Every session card has a Travel fee field next to its session total. Spatiko prices it from the assigned photographer’s travel settings when the session is booked or its photographer changes (marked auto until you save), and a session with no one assigned reads no photographer. Type a different amount to override it for that trip, and use the reset arrow to go back to the photographer’s rate. The Travel fee row in the order’s Pricing rail is the sum of those trips, so you don’t edit it there. For how those rates are worked out, see travel time and fees and custom travel zones.

The exception is an order whose travel fee was set as one amount for the whole order — entered while the order had no scheduled session, or brought in by an import. That amount stays editable in the Pricing rail. When the sessions’ trips add up to something different, the rail says so — “This travel fee is set manually. The sessions’ trips add up to $X” — and Use sessions switches the order back to the per-trip fees.

Overriding tax on one order

Your sales tax rates apply to every order automatically. When a shoot lands somewhere else — across a state or provincial line, in a city with its own rate — edit the taxes in the order’s Pricing rail, on the Billing card. You get a checkbox list of the rates you’ve configured, pre-checked to match what the order is currently using: uncheck the ones that don’t apply, uncheck all of them to mark the order tax-exempt, or hit Reset to business defaults to drop the override. Every other order is untouched.

Order notes

An order holds three kinds of notes, each with its own audience:

• Internal notes — private to you and your team.
• Client-facing notes — visible to the client.
• Access instructions — how to get into the property, so whoever shoots it isn’t locked out.

Clients and company on the order

An order isn’t limited to the client who booked it. The sidebar’s Clients section lists everyone on the order — the listing agent, a co-listing agent, the seller, a billing contact — with tags showing what each person gets: the delivery, the ability to pay, a spot on the property website, an invoice. Add client puts someone new on; each person’s role and toggles are editable individually, and removing someone takes away their access on this order without touching their client record. Everyone here is a real client record, so a tenant with the key or a stager you need to reach goes on as a client too.

Below it, the Company section shows the brokerage the order belongs to. New orders pick up the client’s company automatically. Use Link to a company… to add one, or the row’s menu to Change company… or Remove company from this order. Companies covers how brokerages group their agents’ orders.

The roles, their defaults, and what each person receives are covered in agents, sellers, and billing contacts.

Booking answers

If the client answered questions on your order form, their answers sit in the sidebar’s Details section under Booking answers, with answers to service-specific questions grouped under the service. You can correct an answer right there. Orders you create by hand don’t collect booking answers. Booking questions covers how to set them up.

Resending the confirmation

You can (re)send the order confirmation email at any time. It goes to every participant set to receive delivery emails and includes the schedule, address, and services, plus an optional personal note. Pricing and the attached billing document — the order’s live invoice if one has been issued, a receipt once the order is paid, otherwise a quote — appear only on the primary client’s copy, and only when they’re the order’s sole payer. On an order split across more than one payer, no confirmation carries billing; each payer gets their own invoice send. It only sends when the primary client has an email on file, and it can’t be sent for a cancelled order.

Billing

Every order tracks its payment status — unpaid, awaiting payment, partial, paid, overdue, refunded, or partially refunded. The money itself lives on the order’s Billing card: the balance due, Record payment and Request payment actions, the order’s invoices and its payment history. Invoices are created from here too — for the full order, a deposit, or the remaining balance, billed to any person on the order. For the invoice side in depth, see creating and sending an invoice and deposits and balance invoices; for pay-to-download, see getting paid.

An order can also be billed on a combined invoice together with the client’s other shoots — made from the Invoices page, the client’s Billing tab, Invoice together on the Orders list, or a client’s weekly or monthly billing. The Billing card then shows a row for it, “On INV-…”, with how much of this order’s share has been paid. While it’s there, the order can’t be paid or recorded on its own: Record payment and Request payment point you to the combined invoice instead, and the client pays through that invoice’s link. Billing many orders on one invoice covers how those invoices work.

Files and floor plans

Not everything you hand over is a photo or a video. Alongside the links you paste onto an order — virtual tours, external galleries — you can upload files: a PDF feature sheet, a brochure, a CAD drawing, a set of measurements. They show up on the client’s gallery as downloadable deliverables, sitting next to those pasted links. Photos and video aren’t accepted here; they belong in the order’s photo and video sections, where the delivery gallery can do its job. Uploading files this way needs Dropbox connected and a folder linked to the order — the Upload file action appears on orders backed by Dropbox.

If you’ve connected CubiCasa, the order’s Floor Plans area lets you order a floor plan for the shoot or attach a CubiCasa order you placed already. The finished plan lands back on the order on its own, ready to deliver with everything else.

Scheduling

Sessions — booking, rescheduling, reassigning photographers, and adding a second shoot to one order — all live on the calendar. See managing shoots for how that works.

Clients have a way in, too. If one can’t move their booking themselves, they can send you the times that would suit them; the request arrives as a notification and is written onto the order, where you decide what to do with it. Nothing on your calendar moves until you move it.

When a client asks for changes

A client reviewing their delivered photos can flag individual shots and tell you what they’d like different. Those flagged photos surface on the order with the client’s notes attached, a filter to show only the flagged ones so you’re not hunting through the full set, and a way to mark them resolved once you’ve reworked them. Delivering your media covers the round trip in more detail. For video, feedback runs through Frame.io video review instead — the client comments on the cut itself, usually before delivery.

Cancelling vs. archiving

These do different things:

• Cancelling marks the order as won’t-happen, and it does a lot more than change a label. Its scheduled sessions are deleted from your calendar, the line items are voided and any discount and travel fee cleared, downloads are locked even if the order had been paid, the client’s gallery link stops working, and any published property website comes down. The cancel dialog also lets you delete the order’s media outright if you want it gone. The order and its history stay on your side. If the order is on a combined invoice, that invoice isn’t voided, because it still bills the client’s other shoots: a draft simply drops the order, and an issued or paid one gets a credit note for just this order’s lines. See the order lifecycle for how stages fit together.
• Archiving is separate from status, and reversible — but it isn’t purely cosmetic, and it isn’t for tidying finished jobs. An order with payments or open invoices on it can’t be archived — the app tells you plainly, “This order has payments on it. Cancel the order to archive it.” Archive is for orders that never collected anything, or were cancelled and fully refunded. It moves the order out of your active list, out of the client’s portal, and unpublishes the order’s property website. Status and history are untouched, and you can unarchive it any time — the property website goes back up with it.

Neither one is the way to quietly tidy up a live job. If the client still needs their gallery or their property website, leave the order active.

Archived or cancelled, the order stays in your history and on the client’s record — it’s the client’s own view of it that changes.

Go deeper

• CubiCasa floor plans — order a scan for the shoot and have the finished plan land back on the order.
• Recording cash, check and other manual payments — log an offline payment so the order’s balance and status catch up.
• Refunding a client — issue a full or partial refund, including as part of cancelling the order.
• Agents, sellers, and billing contacts — put more than one person on the order, each with their own access.
• Assigning shoots to your team — move a session to a different photographer once the order exists.