When you work at one address and invoice another

You fit saddles. The horse stands at a livery yard outside the village, its owner lives in town, and your booking page has one address box. Whichever of the two your customer types into it, you find out on the morning itself — either standing in front of a terraced house with a saddle under your arm, or with an invoice that went to a paddock.

That is not a customer who filled the form in badly. It is a form that asked one question where your trade has two answers: where the work is, and who gets the invoice. Your booking page can ask both. One of the two is the address Schedulinq plans with, the other is only something you record — and getting that the right way round is the whole of this page.

Which address Schedulinq plans with

The Address on the details step is not one of your own fields, and it is not decoration. Four things hang off it:

It is checked against your service area. Outside it, your customer is told you do not come there — before they ever pick a time.
It becomes the appointment's address: what stands in the confirmation, in the calendar entry, and on the job.
It counts towards the travel time between two consecutive jobs, so it moves which slots the next customer is offered.
On a brand-new customer it is saved to their customer record.

So the stable goes in that box. The address you invoice is something you build yourself, out of custom fields.

What you are building

Four rows become eight, in this order, on the Details step:

Row	What it is
Subheading — Where is the horse?	Your own text
Address — street, house number, postal code, city, country	The built-in field
Subheading — Invoice address	Your own text
Street, house number, postal code, city	Four custom fields you create

Two blocks that look alike, each announced by a line saying which is which. The rest of the page is how you get there.

Step 1 — Make the fields for the second address

Under Settings → Custom fields, on the Customer tab, create four:

Key	Type	Label
`billing_street`	Text	Street
`billing_house_number`	Text	House number
`billing_postal_code`	Text	Postal code
`billing_city`	Text	City

Customer, not Appointment

Required

A billing address belongs to the person, not to this one visit. On the customer it is asked once and is still there next year; on the appointment you would be asking for it again at every fitting.

Why

This is the choice you cannot undo. A field does not move from customer to appointment later — you archive it and start again. See Add your own fields.

Show on the online booking page

Tick it

Without this tick the fields exist only in your own admin forms and your customer never sees them.

Required for the customer when booking online

Leave it off

Most customers keep their horse at their own address, or are perfectly happy to be invoiced at the yard. For them these four boxes have nothing to add.

Why

Made mandatory, this asks every customer to type an address twice, and the ones who do it obediently are the ones who copy the stable into both. An empty invoice address is not missing data — it is the answer the same as above.

Use the same words as the address above

Street, House number, Postal code, City — the same four labels the built-in block uses.

Why

The two blocks are the same thing twice, and they should read that way. Call one of them Street name and the other Street, and your customer starts wondering what the difference is meant to be.

Step 2 — Put them in order on the booking page

Go to Online booking → Public page → Details step. Under Fields your four new fields are already in the list, marked Custom field. Drag them by the handle on the left until they sit directly under Address.

Then set the widths on the right of each row, so the second block has the shape of the first:

Field	Width
Street	Full width
House number	Half width
Postal code	Half width
City	Full width

House number and postal code end up side by side; street and city each take a line of their own.

Step 3 — Write the two subheadings

This is the part that does the actual work. Hover the row the heading should sit above and a + Add subheading button appears above and below it — so you place it where it belongs instead of adding it at the bottom and dragging it up.

Each subheading has a Label and a Subheading description, both per language.

Above the Address row

Label: Where is the horse?

Subheading description: Fill in the address of the stable where your horse is kept. That is where we come — and it is the address we check against the area we cover.

Why

Your customer is not being careless; they are answering the question they think you asked. Address on its own means "your address" to almost everyone. Naming the stable in the heading is what turns it into a different question, and the second sentence gives them a reason to take it seriously: this is what decides whether you turn up at all.

Above your own four fields

Label: Invoice address

Subheading description: Is your horse not kept at your own address? Then fill in your own address here. Leave it empty and we will use the address above.

Why

The condition has to come first — is your horse not kept at your own address? — because the customers this does not apply to can then stop reading at the question mark. And the last sentence is the one that stops half of them typing the stable in twice: it tells them that empty is a valid answer, and what it means.

Step 4 — Book it yourself

View booking page at the top right opens your real page in a new tab. Walk through it as a customer, as far as the details step, and read the two blocks in one go without knowing what you meant. Ask yourself the only question that matters: could someone fill this in the wrong way round and not notice?

What this does not do

Here is the honest part. Your own fields do not reach the invoice.

When you issue an invoice, Schedulinq copies the customer's name and address onto it from the customer record — deliberately, so a sent invoice does not change when your customer moves. It copies the built-in address. And on a customer created by an online booking, that address is the one they filled in on the booking page: the stable.

There is no address block to edit on a draft invoice either. A draft lets you change the customer, the lines, the dates and the notes; the address is a snapshot, not a field. So if it matters for a particular customer, it has to be fixed on the customer, before you invoice.

That leaves two ways to work, and which is right depends on who your customers are:

Leave the stable on the record

Most private customers

The invoice carries the stable's address, and it goes out by email anyway. For a private customer that is nothing — they read the amount, not the address block. Your own invoice-address fields sit on the customer record for the one case a year where someone asks.

Move the record to their own address

Business customers

A customer who books through their company needs a correct billing address for their own bookkeeping. Open the customer, copy what they filled in into the built-in address field, and invoice.

Appointments already scheduled do not move: an appointment carries its own address, taken at the time of booking. And the next online booking asks for the stable again, because the booking page never pre-fills the address.

Why

It has a price, so know it before you do it: when you schedule by hand, the form suggests the customer's record address. Move that to their home address and you are overtyping the stable on every appointment you make yourself. Worth it for a handful of business customers, not for your whole book.

The second visit, and the second stable

Three behaviours are worth knowing before your customers find them for you.

The address is asked again every time

An ordinary booking from your website starts with both blocks empty. A customer with horses at two yards simply types the other one; the appointment carries that address, and their record is left alone.

The record address is only filled once

A customer who has no address yet adopts the one from their first booking. A customer who already has one keeps it — a single fitting somewhere else does not overwrite what is on their record.

An invitation opens filled in

Invite a customer for next year's check and their details step opens with the address and your own fields already filled in from their record. They confirm rather than retype — and can correct the stable if the horse has moved. See Send invitations.

Frequently asked questions

Can I have one field that is a whole address? No. There are thirteen custom field types and none of them is an address, so a second address is four text fields. Only the built-in address on the details step is a real address — and there is exactly one of those.

Can I offer a list of stables to choose from instead? You can add a Select field with the yards you visit, and for a fitter working four or five it reads beautifully. It does not replace the address, though: the select is a label, and Schedulinq still needs the address itself for the service area and the travel time.

Do these fields show up in my overviews? Yes. Any custom field can be switched on as a column via Configure columns, and text fields join the search bar, so you can find a customer by their own postcode. See Configure columns.

Can I ask for the invoice address only from business customers? Yes — under Applies to on the field, set the customer type to Business customers only. The four fields then disappear for private customers instead of being optional for everyone.

My customer filled the stable in twice. Nothing to repair automatically: copy the right address onto their record and it is right from then on. If it keeps happening, the description under the second subheading is where to fix it — not the label.

Does this work when I also see customers at my own workshop? Yes, and it takes care of itself. A booking at one of your locations does not ask for an address, so the address block and its heading are not shown; the invoice-address block is. See At the customer or on location.