July 12, 2026 · 7 min read
Every service business does work it decides not to bill for. A warranty callback. A five-minute courtesy fix while you’re already on site. A goodwill visit to keep a good customer happy. The right way to handle it isn’t to pretend it never happened — it’s to write it up properly and charge nothing. But until now, doing that left a mess behind.
The new No Charge status in Dispatch Scout is built for exactly this. It gives a $0.00 invoice a proper home: intentionally free, out of your receivables, locked so the numbers can’t drift — while keeping the full record of the work you did.
Here’s the situation the feature solves. A tech runs a no-charge warranty callback and, correctly, writes a real invoice: the labor and parts are on it, each priced at $0.00, so there’s a record of what was actually done. Good practice. But that invoice then sat as Open forever — because as far as the system knew, it was an unpaid bill.
Do that a few dozen times over a year and a customer’s invoice list fills up with phantom “unpaid” invoices that nobody is ever going to pay. Your open-invoice count is wrong. Your receivables look padded. And the one honest thing the tech did — documenting free work — is what created the clutter.
Marking an invoice No Charge tells Dispatch Scout three things at once:
The status badge on the invoice reads No Charge, and it’s clear to anyone who opens it that this was deliberate.
This is the distinction that matters most, so it’s worth stating plainly:
A voided invoice is one that shouldn’t exist — a duplicate, a mistake, the wrong customer. A No Charge invoice is a real record of real work that you chose not to bill.
Void is for errors you want to erase. No Charge is for work you want to keep on the books at $0 — because it happened, because you may want to reference it later, and often because you want to hand it to the customer to show them what you did for free. Same $0.00 total, completely different meaning. Now the system has a word for each.
It takes three clicks from the invoice itself:
The confirmation spells out exactly what happens: “Mark this invoice as No Charge? It will be excluded from your receivables and locked from further edits. You can reopen it later if something changes.” The badge flips to No Charge and the amounts lock.
The option only appears when the invoice genuinely owes nothing — the total is $0.00, no payments have been recorded, and no customer credits have been applied. If money has changed hands or credits are in play, No Charge is hidden on purpose (more on that below).
Marking No Charge isn’t a one-way door. Maybe you decide to bill after all, or it was set on the wrong invoice. Open it, click the actions menu, and choose Reopen for Editing. The invoice returns to Open, becomes fully editable again, and reappears in your receivables. And because Dispatch Scout records who marked it No Charge and who reopened it — with timestamps — there’s always a clean audit trail behind the decision.
You might wonder why Dispatch Scout doesn’t just auto-mark every $0.00 invoice as No Charge and save you the clicks. The answer is important:
The system can’t tell a finished free visit from an invoice nobody has priced yet. Both are $0.00. So a $0.00 invoice stays Open — visible as unfinished work — until a person confirms the zero was deliberate.
That’s the safer default. The alternative would quietly hide invoices that simply hadn’t been priced yet — turning a “finish this quote” reminder into an invisible gap in your billing. No Charge is a decision, so a human makes it.
The same care shows up in one more guardrail: an invoice whose balance is $0 only because a customer credit was applied can’t be marked No Charge. That money is real revenue — writing it off as a courtesy would erase it from your reports. No Charge is reserved for invoices that are truly zero, with nothing collected against them.
On the web, No Charge is an office decision — available to owners, admins, managers, dispatch, sales, and accounting, but never to technicians. That’s the right default for most teams.
But plenty of shops want a trusted lead tech to close out a warranty call on the spot without phoning the office. So it’s a per-person mobile permission you can grant deliberately: go to Team > Users, pick the person, open their Mobile Permissions, and under Invoices turn on No charge. It’s off for everyone by default, applies only to the mobile app, and takes effect after the tech restarts their app. Grant it to the people you trust with it, and leave it off for everyone else.
The payoff is that a No Charge invoice does the two things a $0 courtesy invoice should always have done, and never conflicts them:
It stays out of the numbers that measure money. No Charge invoices are excluded from Accounts Receivable, revenue reports, customer lifetime value, and technician leaderboards. A tech isn’t penalized for running a warranty callback — and doesn’t get revenue credit for work that wasn’t billed. Your reports stay honest.
It stays in the record that documents work. The invoice remains in the customer’s history and on the job. You can still email, text, or print it — handing the customer a clearly marked $0.00 invoice is often the entire point — and you can still add notes, tags, and an internal memo. It even syncs to QuickBooks, where a $0.00 invoice has no effect on your books but keeps your two systems telling the same story.
Void is for an invoice that shouldn’t exist — a duplicate or a mistake. No Charge is for real work you chose not to bill. No Charge keeps the record and lets you send it to the customer; Void erases it as an error.
Yes — that’s often the whole point. Even with the amounts locked, you can email, text, or print it, add notes and tags, edit the internal memo, and sync to QuickBooks.
No Charge invoices drop out of receivables, revenue, lifetime value, and tech performance metrics, but stay in the customer’s history and on the job. They still sync to QuickBooks, where a $0.00 invoice has no effect on your books.
Not on the web — it’s reserved for office roles. In the field, grant it per person under Team > Users > Mobile Permissions > Invoices > No charge. It’s off by default and takes effect after the tech restarts the app.
Yes. Open the invoice, click the actions menu, and choose Reopen for Editing. It returns to Open, becomes editable, and reappears in receivables — with a full record of who did what and when.
No Charge is available now on every Dispatch Scout account — there’s nothing to switch on. The next time a warranty callback or courtesy fix produces a $0.00 invoice, open it, hit the actions menu, and choose Mark as No Charge. Your receivables stay clean, your reports stay honest, and the record of the good work you did for free stays right where it belongs.
Mark warranty callbacks and courtesy fixes as No Charge in Dispatch Scout — out of receivables, locked from edits, and still ready to hand to the customer.
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