Home inspection invoices and payments — Stripe, PayPal, no platform cut

Home inspection invoices and payments should collect your fee, not a platform tax on every roof. Inspecta Home 360 lets you send an invoice with a pay link, collect through Stripe or PayPal, and optionally hold the report until the invoice is paid. Inspecta Home takes no cut of the inspection fee. Inspecta Home does not inspect houses. You are the business that earned the walk.

Payment processing has to be boring and correct. Never store raw card numbers. Never log payment credentials. Never trust client-provided payment state. Never mark invoices paid based solely on frontend events. Payment state should derive from authoritative provider events. Webhooks should be authenticated, idempotent, logged, and retry-safe. That is how home inspection software should treat money.

Two bills, two screens

You pay Inspecta Home for seats under Account → Billing. Clients pay you for inspections under Firm Billing. Mixing those screens is the most common confusion in a growing firm. The Help article Inspecta Home subscription vs client invoices exists because people refund the wrong charge.

Account → Billing is Solo, Team, or Scale, optional extra seats, the 7-day trial, and the card for software. Cancel in Manage billing before the trial ends if you do not want the first charge. Firm Billing is where you connect Stripe Connect or PayPal so inspection payments land with you. Job add-ons like radon price the inspection. Extra seats are software. Do not confuse them.

Invoices, Stripe, and PayPal is the how-to: the job carries the fee from the estimate or booking; an invoice with a pay link goes to the client portal and /pay/token; you collect; you do not mix the two bills.

The fee should already exist before you inspect

Live booking and estimates should price square footage, age, travel, and add-ons with the same rules. When the job is created, the fee is on the job. Creating a blank invoice after the walk is how numbers drift. If you discounted at the door, change the job on the record, do not privately Venmo and leave the invoice high.

Hold-until-paid uses that invoice. If the invoice is wrong, the gate is gating the wrong amount. Fix the document, then collect. Buyers will pay a clear fee in a portal. They will stall on a surprise number in an email.

Write the fee rules once: base service, square footage bands, year built, mileage, and add-ons such as radon or sewer scope. The public book page, the estimate, and the invoice should all use that catalog. If the office still types a number into a note, you will collect the wrong amount and argue about it after the walk. Inspecta Home 360 is the workspace for the fee, not a place to hide a second price list.

When you discount, discount on the job. A verbal “I’ll take a hundred off” that never hits the invoice makes hold-until-paid look greedy. A recorded discount looks like a professional courtesy. The portal should show the number you actually expect to collect.

When payment does not show

Clients screenshot “paid” while the invoice still shows unpaid. Do not release the report from a screenshot. Processor delays, a mismatched email, a PayPal hold, or a webhook that needs a retry are more likely than a haunted database. Use invoice still shows unpaid after client pays. Then, if the job is gated, keep it gated until the invoice is actually paid.

Retries must not create duplicate invoices or duplicate charges. Idempotency is a product requirement, not a nice-to-have. If you run a crew, office staff should see the same paid/unpaid state as the inspector. Nobody should have a private “I think they paid” channel.

Portal first, side channels never

The pay link belongs in the portal and in the client message templates you control. Do not send a personal Cash App from the truck. That payment will never flip the invoice, never lift the hold, and never show in analytics as a collected job. If you must take a check, record it in the system the same day.

Analytics later shows booked fees by inspector, agent, and service — booked fees, not cash collected. Firm Billing is cash and invoices. Analytics is not a substitute for the processor. Read the numbers for what they are.

Pricing the software vs pricing the job

Monthly seats, no per-inspection fee, is how Inspecta Home 360 is sold. See pricing. That is what you pay to use the writer and the portal. What you charge the buyer is your business: base price, square footage, age, add-ons, travel, discount. Keep that logic in services and fee rules, not in a spreadsheet only you understand.

A payment runbook that does not depend on heroics

Connect Stripe or PayPal before you need them, not on the driveway after the walk. Send the invoice when the job is booked or when your policy says, not “when I remember.” If you hold the report, say so in the confirmation message so nobody is surprised. If a payment fails, the invoice stays unpaid and the gate stays shut. That is correct. Retry from the portal. Do not invent a second invoice for the same job unless you actually changed the fee.

Office staff should be able to see paid vs unpaid without asking the inspector. Inspectors should not be collecting cash as a lifestyle. If a builder prepaid, turn the hold off on that job and still keep the invoice on the record as paid. The board should tell the truth to the next person who opens the card.

Never log full payment credentials. Never paste a card number into job chat. Never mark paid because an agent said “they paid you last week.” Authoritative events only. If the processor and the job disagree, believe the processor until you reconcile, then fix the job. Home inspection invoices and payments work when the job, the invoice, the portal, and the processor agree. Connect Stripe or PayPal. Keep software billing separate. Hold the report if you need to. Take no lecture from a platform that wants a cut of your roof.