//Feature · Delivery

Stages your client can watch

In week four the email arrives: "just checking in, where are we?" The signed proposal already said where you would be. North turns the accepted option into a delivery schedule the client can see for themselves, and turns finished stages into invoice lines that remember what has been billed.

A signed proposal contains a schedule whether or not anybody wrote one. The client accepted an option with three named services and a timeline; the delivery order is implied by the scope. What usually happens next is that the schedule lives in your head, the client asks how it is going in week four, and you write a status email that says less than the proposal already did.

North makes the implied schedule explicit and puts it where the client can read it.

How the stages are made

Once the contract is signed, North proposes a delivery schedule from the accepted option: one stage per service the client bought, in the order the work will actually happen, with due dates spread across the agreed timeline and each stage carrying its share of the price. If your payment terms include a deposit, it appears as a first stage on its own.

You see this as a card, and nothing exists until you confirm it. Change the dates, split a stage, add one that the proposal implied but did not name, remove one. When you confirm, the schedule is frozen as the agreed plan and shown in the client's deal room alongside the signed contract.

Running it

As work lands, you mark the stage done. The tick is a confirm with an undo, so a slip of the hand is not a broadcast to the client. The client sees the stage change in their room and sees the finished work when you choose to show it there. They can leave a note on what they see; you read the whole note on the project and reply when you are ready.

What you are not doing is writing status emails. The room already says what has happened. When a client does ask, the answer is a link they already have.

Why this is really about being paid

Every finished stage is an invoice line waiting to be used. When you draft an invoice from the project, the delivered stages are already there, at the price the client agreed to, and each one remembers whether it has been billed. Bill a deposit up front; bill a milestone when it lands; bill the rest at the end. The stage ledger will not let the same work be charged twice, and it will not let an invoice quietly drift from the figure the client signed.

This is the difference between "invoice for phase two" as a thing you reconstruct from memory in month three and a line that was true the day the work was done.

What North notices for you

A stage coming due in the next few days. A stage that went past its date without being marked done. A project where every stage is delivered and no invoice has been drafted. Each of those is surfaced in your daily digest and on the project itself, so the things that slip are the things you see, without opening every project every morning to check.

Where it stops

Stages are not tasks. There is no checklist under each one, no assignee, no board, and no client-side task list; if you run your production in a task manager, keep doing that, and use stages for the layer the client is entitled to see. There is no client approval gate: the client reads, the schedule is yours. And stages are part of the paid plan, because they are the machinery that builds invoices from delivered work; the full invoice at the end works on every plan without them. Why the line sits there is explained on the pricing page.

Common questions

What if my projects do not run in neat stages?
Then edit the ones North proposes, add and remove stages, or skip them entirely. The full invoice at the end of a project works on every plan without any stages at all. Stages exist for the projects where a client is anxious about progress and you are anxious about being paid for the parts that are done, which in practice is most projects over a few weeks.
Does the client tick things off or approve stages?
No. The schedule is yours to run; the client reads it. They see each stage, its date, and whether it is done, and they see the finished work you choose to show. They can leave a note on that work, which reaches you in full. Approval of the work itself, in the sense of a client sign-off gate, is not a mechanism North has.
How does a deposit fit?
As a stage of its own at the top of the schedule, when your payment terms call for one. It can be invoiced on its own before any work starts, and the remaining stages carry the rest of the price between them, so the sum of the schedule always matches the sum the client agreed to.