How CLEO treats money

CLEO knows exactly one thing about money: the payments and refunds someone recorded in CLEO. Everything money-shaped in CLEO — a customer's total, a ranking, a figure on a screen — is built from those entries and nothing else.

What CLEO never works out for itself

CLEO has appointments, work, requests and customers. It could, in principle, guess at money from any of them. It refuses to:

• A completed appointment is not money. It's a thing that happened.
• A finished piece of work is not money, even if you'd normally charge for it.
• A plan or a price you mentioned is not money. Nothing about an agreed price makes a payment real.
• Quotes and invoices don't exist in CLEO at all, so there is nothing for CLEO to infer from.

Money exists in CLEO when — and only when — somebody recorded a payment. That's why the screen says so in plain words: Payments you recorded, including any tax, minus refunds. Nothing is estimated.

The one sum CLEO does

Net received = what you recorded as received, minus what you recorded as refunded.

The amount you record is what the customer actually paid you, including any tax. CLEO doesn't split tax out, doesn't take costs off, and doesn't know your margins. So net received is not profit, and it isn't a tax figure either.

Currencies stay apart

CLEO records the currency of every payment — Canadian and US dollars, euros, pounds, Australian and New Zealand dollars, pesos, yen, francs. It never converts between them and never adds them together, because the right exchange rate on the right day is something CLEO doesn't know.

If you take money in more than one currency, you get a total per currency, and CLEO says why: More than one currency: each is shown on its own. CLEO does not convert between currencies.

Nothing recorded is not zero

Where a business with no recorded payments might expect to see $0.00, CLEO says No payments recorded yet. instead.

That distinction matters. Zero is a claim about your business — no money came in. "No payments recorded" is a claim about CLEO — nobody has told me about any. CLEO can only honestly make the second one.

For the same reason, screens that total money tell you when CLEO's knowledge starts: since CLEO began recording payments on a particular date. Anything you were paid before that date happened, but CLEO wasn't told, so it isn't counted.

Where a payment sits

Every recorded payment belongs to one customer — a client or a lead. Money from someone you're still talking to counts exactly the same as money from an established client.

A payment can also be attached to one piece of that customer's work, so you can see what you were paid for. That's optional, and the work can be at any stage — even finished or archived. Money often arrives after the job is done.

Payments and Billing are different things

Two things in CLEO use money words, and they are not related:

• Payments are money your customers paid you. That's everything on this page.
• Billing on a client's account is about their relationship with your service — whether their account is paid, pending, past due, and so on. It's a status you set. It never creates a payment, and it never changes a total.

Recording that a client's billing is paid does not tell CLEO that money arrived. Only a recorded payment does that.

What CLEO doesn't do with money

CLEO is a record of money received, not a payment system. It doesn't send invoices, doesn't take card payments, doesn't connect to your bank or your accounting software, and doesn't chase anyone for what they owe. You collect money however you already collect it, then tell CLEO what arrived.