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Recurring Appointments, Jobs, & Invoices

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Recurring appointments in BlueSuite help service businesses schedule repeat work, automate future visits, and bill for them without manual effort. This is ideal for businesses that rely on consistent service schedules, such as cleaning, landscaping, and maintenance.

This guide explains how to set up a recurring job, how billing works for repeat visits, and how to manage a schedule over time as things change.

How Recurring Billing Works

It is worth understanding this before you set anything up, because it shapes the whole workflow.

A recurring job bills per visit. Each time one of the job’s appointments is marked complete, an invoice for that visit is created and sent automatically, built from the products and services on the job.

This means you only ever bill for work that actually happened. If a visit gets cancelled or skipped, no invoice goes out for it, and there is nothing to void or clean up afterwards.

Because the billing is per visit, so is the checking. With auto invoicing on, the job watches that every completed visit actually produced its invoice and shows a Needs invoicing badge if one of them did not, rather than going quiet once the first visit has billed. With auto invoicing off it stays out of your way, since you may well be covering several visits with a single invoice of your own.

Setting Up a Recurring Job

Step 1: Create the Job

You can start from scratch, or follow the standard workflow:

  1. Create a request.
  2. Convert the request into a quote.
  3. Approve the quote and convert it into a job.

If you are new to jobs, review the Jobs support guide.

Step 2: Set the Schedule Type to Recurring

  1. Open the job you want to schedule as ongoing.
  2. In the Schedule section, set Schedule Type to Recurring.
  3. Click Save.

Choosing Recurring reveals the billing settings for the job.

Step 3: Choose How Visits Get Billed

These settings live on the job, so you can change them at any point afterwards. The next completed visit picks up the change.

Step 4: Build the Appointment Schedule

Click Schedule Appointments on the job to open the scheduling window. A calendar preview on the right shows you exactly which dates the pattern will produce before you commit to it.

Complete the following:

Save when you are done, and the job moves to Scheduled with the visits on the calendar.

Open-Ended Schedules

If you pick Forever, BlueSuite keeps a rolling window of upcoming visits on the calendar and tops it up automatically as time passes, so the schedule runs indefinitely without cluttering your calendar years into the future.

Dates beyond that rolling window still show on the calendar as auto-scheduled placeholders, dimmed to set them apart from booked visits. Scroll ahead to any month and you see the pattern rather than a gap. Drag one or open it and make a change, and it becomes a real appointment on the spot.

When the customer eventually cancels the service, open the job and click End Schedule. You get two choices:

Either way, completed visits and their invoices are left alone. Use End Schedule rather than deleting the appointments, which would take your history with them.

Where Recurring Schedules Live

Repeat schedules belong to the job. An appointment you book straight from the calendar is always a one-off, whether it is attached to a job, a request, or nothing at all, so there are no recurrence settings in the appointment window. This keeps a single schedule per job instead of competing ones, and it is what lets billing follow the visits.

To add or change repeat visits, go to the job and use Schedule Appointments or Edit Appointments. Internal events and tasks are different: those can still be set to repeat on their own from the calendar. See the Events support guide.

Viewing Visits and Invoices

Upcoming and past appointments are listed on the job record, alongside the invoices produced as those visits were completed. Because invoices are created on completion, the invoice list fills in over time as the work gets done.

The appointment list is one continuous timeline rather than numbered pages, since an open-ended schedule has no last page. It opens on today and you step forward or back with the arrows, seeing booked visits and auto-scheduled ones together in date order.

For more details on invoices, see the Invoices support article.

Editing a Recurring Schedule

You do not need to recreate a series to change it. Open the job and click Edit Appointments. The window opens on the next upcoming visit, and you can change the date, the times, the repeat pattern, the duration, or who is assigned.

Changes to the pattern rebuild the upcoming appointments. Visits that have already happened are kept exactly as they were, so your history and the invoices tied to it stay accurate. Changing only the assignees updates the upcoming visits in place.

One thing to watch: changing the pattern resets any per-visit product customizations on upcoming appointments. If you had tailored the line items for a specific future visit, you will need to set those up again.

To move or adjust a single visit, open it from the calendar and edit it there. Changes stay on that one appointment and the rest of the schedule carries on unchanged, so a one-off reschedule never rewrites the pattern.

Billing One Visit Differently

Sometimes a single visit is not like the others: an extra service, a larger job, a one-time add-on. Open that appointment and click Customize to set the products and services for that visit alone.

The invoice created when that visit is completed uses your customized line items, with the job’s discount, tax, and deposit applied on top. Every other visit keeps billing from the job as normal, and the appointment shows a note that it has been customized.

Missed and Skipped Visits

If a visit is cancelled, mark the appointment as Cancelled. No invoice is created for it and the rest of the schedule carries on unaffected.

If a visit date passes without anyone marking it complete, BlueSuite flags the appointment as Missed and shows a Missed badge on the job so it does not quietly disappear. Rescheduling the visit to a future date clears the flag.

When a Recurring Job Closes

A recurring job stays open for as long as its schedule is producing work. It will not close itself while visits are still to come, which is what you want for ongoing service.

Once the schedule has ended and every visit has been completed and paid for, the job completes on its own. If the last invoice is out but not yet paid, the job shows Awaiting payment in the meantime, so you can tell the difference between a schedule still running and one that is finished bar the money. You can also close the job by hand at any point using Mark job complete on the job page.

Summary

Recurring jobs in BlueSuite let you: