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Monthly retainers

Turn your quotes into automatic monthly subscriptions where the client authorizes their card only once.

Goodbye to the hassle of collecting every month

If you are a marketing agency, a consulting firm, or you sell a service on a “Retainer” basis, you know how painful it is to have to send a payment link or a manual invoice to your client every 1st of the month and chase them down to pay it.

Cord Payments solves this by turning your quote into a real subscription, natively integrated with your bank account.

How to enable a monthly retainer?

For the recurring model to work, it is strictly required that you have Cord Payments connected (see Connect your account) and the Credit/debit card method enabled. (Note: automatic monthly billing cannot work with SPEI or with bank transfer with a reference, because the client initiates a transfer from their bank every month).

  1. Open your quote editor and, in step 1, Who are you quoting?, leave the term on Due on receipt: with a credit term the retainer switch doesn’t appear.
  2. In step 3, Terms, turn on the Monthly recurring charge (retainer) switch.
  3. Turning it on hides the Deposit (%) field, because a recurring charge is a fixed fee, and a note shows you the amount that will be charged every month.

The client experience

When you send the quote link, the client reads their proposal normally and approves it. They then see the “Authorize your monthly plan” block with the monthly amount and its currency (for example, $12,000.00 MXN):

  1. Clicking “Authorize monthly charge” takes them to the payment page, which, before asking for the card, shows the monthly charge authorization: the amount that will be charged to their card today and every month until the retainer is canceled, that they can cancel it at any time from that same link or by writing to you, and that the cancellation takes effect at the end of the period already paid.
  2. They check the box and enter their credit or debit card. Cord keeps the text they accepted with its version and fingerprint, the date and time, the IP address and the browser; if a retainer charge is disputed, that record goes into the evidence.
  3. The system makes the first charge immediately to activate the retainer.
  4. Cord Payments charges that same amount every month on the saved card and sends the funds straight to your bank account.

You never store card data: the system tokenizes it and retries automatically if the card fails one month. If a monthly charge doesn’t go through or the bank asks the client to confirm it (3D Secure), the link says “Monthly plan payment pending” instead of “Active recurring plan”, and the client can confirm it there with the same card or another one. If the quote has an email (the signer’s or the client’s), they get a notice with that link, once per charge. You’ll see it in the quote’s activity and in the “Active retainers” widget on the payments dashboard.

Every monthly charge pays the same total fee as a normal card payment — there’s no volume discount for recurring charges. That total fee (4% + $3.00 MXN + VAT, which includes card processing) is the current rate for retainers charged in Mexican pesos (MXN). On a retainer in another currency, Cord applies no platform fee today; Settings › Payments › Fees shows this in your account’s currency. See the details in Fees and advantages.

Cancellation

Unlike traditional quotes (which switch to a “Paid” status once fully paid), a recurring retainer is never marked as fully paid, because it is continuous.

The client can cancel it from the same quote link, with the “Cancel my monthly plan” button:

  • If they’re up to date, the retainer stays active until the end of the period they already paid, with no charges after that.
  • If the last monthly charge didn’t go through, it’s canceled right away and the retries stop, because the paid period has already ended.

The client gets a confirmation by email, and you see the cancellation in the quote’s activity, in a task and in the audit log. A canceled retainer doesn’t offer “Authorize your monthly plan” again: to start over, send a new quote.

You can also cancel it from the quote details in your dashboard, where the status card says whether it’s “Active”, “Payment due” or “Canceled”, and whether the client asked to cancel it. Press “Cancel retainer” (you need the Collections permission and to confirm your identity): the retainer stops charging at the end of the current period, and this month’s charge already made is not refunded.