Deposit and Payment Schedule Builder

A payment schedule looks like admin and is actually the difference between running a business and lending money to one.

Put in the total, when they pay you, and when your own costs go out. The tool shows the position week by week and answers the question the schedule is really for: how much of your own money is in this job, and for how many weeks.

Then it shows the same job three ways — your schedule, paid entirely on completion, and paid entirely up front — with the profit in the last column of all three. That column is identical every time, and that is the argument. A payment schedule changes nothing about what the job earns and everything about who funds it while it runs. Businesses fail holding profitable work.

It also catches the thing that surfaces a week after you finish: stages that do not add up to the total. Twenty-five plus fifty plus twenty is ninety-five, and the missing five per cent is money nobody has been asked for. The page says so rather than quietly losing it.

Save as many versions as you like and put any two side by side, figure against figure, with the better one on each line marked and the difference in its own column. That screen is the one that decides things, and it is the part a free calculator cannot do at all. Two schedules side by side is where the case for a deposit gets made, in figures rather than in feelings about fairness.

It cannot make a client agree to anything and it is not a contract — what makes a deposit stick is what your terms say. What this does is put a number on what you are lending them, which is a far better thing to bring to that conversation.

One HTML file. No account, no subscription, no internet needed. Opens on Windows, Mac and Android; the readme explains the extra step on iPhone and iPad, where Apple blocks JavaScript in downloaded files and every tool of this kind is affected.

Everything lives in your browser on your device. Nothing is uploaded, which is why it works offline and why nobody else can see your figures — and it also means clearing your browsing data deletes it. The tool does not pretend otherwise: the header shows how long since your last export at all times, turns amber after three days and red after seven, and export is one click that produces a plain file you keep.