Stripe, PayPal, and the two kinds of billing

Stripe and PayPal are easy to name and easy to confuse when a growing inspection firm has more than one kind of payment. The first kind is Account Billing: what your company pays Inspecta Home for software seats and access. The second is Firm Billing: what your clients pay your firm for inspection services. Good home inspection software keeps those responsibilities separate. Inspecta Home 360 is software, not an inspector. It does not choose findings, and it does not replace your judgment. Inspecta Home does not inspect houses and takes no cut of client payments.

This distinction is more than a label in a sidebar. Account Billing has a plan, seats, a trial, and a subscription payment method. Firm Billing has services, estimates, invoices, pay links, processor events, refunds, and the paid state for a particular inspection. When both are called “billing,” office staff look in the wrong screen and clients get answers that sound evasive. Name the owner of the money and the job it belongs to.

Account Billing pays for seats

Account Billing is the software relationship. Solo is $119, Team is $169, and Scale is $229. Inspecta Copilot is included. Extra seats are $25, and each plan has a 7-day trial. There is no per-job fee. Your subscription should not rise simply because you completed more inspections in a busy month. Team and Scale can add people according to your plan’s permissions and seat rules.

The account owner should be able to see the current plan, seat count, next charge, trial status, and subscription payment method without seeing a client’s invoice history. A failed subscription card should create an Account Billing task. It should not mark a home inspection unpaid, and it should not release or close a report. Those states belong to different domains.

The Inspecta billing Help article should explain this screen in plain terms: use Account Billing for the software subscription, seats, trial, and plan changes. If the question begins with “why was our workspace charged,” start there. If the question begins with “did the buyer pay for the inspection,” move to Firm Billing.

Firm Billing collects client fees

Firm Billing begins with the inspection service. The job should carry the service, property, client, quoted amount, add-ons, discount, and invoice. Connect Stripe or PayPal according to your firm’s setup. The client receives a pay link in the portal or another approved channel. The resulting invoice state belongs to the job and should be visible to the people who are authorized to manage it.

Do not hide a second price list in an email. If square footage, travel, age, radon, sewer scope, or a reinspection changes the fee, record the change on the inspection. The estimate, booking, invoice, and receipt should be explainable from the same pricing rules. A payment processor can collect the amount you send; it cannot explain why that amount changed after the walk.

Firm Billing is your revenue. Inspecta Home takes no cut of client payments. Stripe or PayPal may have their own provider terms and fees, but the platform does not take a percentage of the inspection fee. You keep the relationship with the client and the responsibility for setting the service price.

Never confuse a success page with a paid invoice

Payment state must come from the provider, not a button in the browser. A client screenshot, an agent’s text, or a redirect to a “thank you” page is not an authoritative event. Verify the webhook or provider record, match the invoice and amount, and process it idempotently. If the same event arrives twice, it should not create two receipts, two charges, or two report releases.

The Payment not showing paid Help article is the recovery path when a client says they paid but Firm Billing still says unpaid. Check the provider reference, event status, email or customer match, amount, and any retry queue. Keep the invoice visibly unpaid until the event is reconciled. Do not manually flip the flag because the client is standing in front of the office.

Security boundaries matter at this point. Do not store raw card numbers. Do not log payment credentials. Do not paste a secret webhook token into a support message. Authenticate incoming events and retain only the safe identifiers needed to reconcile them. A small amount of useful event history is better than a verbose log full of sensitive data.

Report delivery belongs to the job

If your firm holds the report until the agreement is signed and the invoice is paid, use Firm Billing’s paid state as one input to the job-level gate. The other input is the agreement. Account Billing should never release a client report. A subscription renewal says that your software account is active; it says nothing about whether this buyer paid for this inspection.

The portal should show the client what remains: sign the agreement, pay the invoice, or wait for a payment event to reconcile. The gate should use authorized server-side checks and should record an override if staff releases a prepaid job. A report link must not become public merely because someone knows the URL. Tenant and recipient access still apply after payment.

Generate the report from the structured inspection record. Findings, photos, scope limitations, recommendations, and the selected report version belong to the inspection. Copilot can help draft wording, but Inspecta Copilot suggestions are not confirmed findings until you review them. Billing automation should never rewrite inspection content or present AI language as verified observation.

Standards are another separate reference

The InterNACHI Standards of Practice can inform your inspection scope and report template. The ASHI resources can provide additional professional context. Neither is Account Billing or Firm Billing. A standards reference helps explain what you inspect; it does not verify a payment or decide whether a report should be released.

Separating these concerns keeps the product easier to operate. Inspectors can focus on documenting the property. Office staff can reconcile invoices. Owners can review subscription seats and inspection revenue without combining two ledgers. Clients get a clear pay path instead of a generic account screen.

A short runbook for the office

1. Use Account Billing to confirm the software plan, seats, trial, and subscription status.
2. Use Firm Billing to confirm the service, price, client invoice, provider connection, and payment event.
3. Use the inspection job to verify the agreement, report version, delivery gate, and authorized recipients.
4. Use the Help recovery path when a provider event is delayed instead of creating a duplicate invoice.

That runbook prevents the most expensive category error: treating the software subscription as proof that a client paid. It also prevents the reverse error: treating a client payment as proof that the software account is current. They are separate obligations with separate records and separate support questions.

Stripe, PayPal, and the two kinds of billing should be obvious to every person who opens the board. For the end-to-end payment workflow, read home inspection software with payment processing. For delivery policy, read hold the PDF until they sign and pay. The best system is not the one with the most financial buttons. It is the one that tells the right person what happened, what is trusted, and what to do next.