Yes — and not by bolting a "residential mode" onto a commercial product. Residential and commercial clients run through the same scheduling, dispatch, contractor, and finance engine. What changes between them is configuration, not code path.
If you run a mixed book — a few hundred homes and a dozen strata or facility contracts — you do not need two systems, two invoice numbering sequences, or two schedules.
What is actually different
Four things behave differently, and each is a setting you control.
1. The client type
Every client carries a type: residential, commercial, strata, or body_corporate. It is set when the client is created and can be changed later.
The type is not cosmetic. It seeds sensible defaults (below) and it keeps your reporting honest — "how much of my revenue is residential" is a question the data can answer.
strata covers individual strata owners. body_corporate covers the legal entity that manages a strata scheme and contracts for common-property services. Keeping those apart matters when you invoice one and take instructions from the other.
2. The service catalogue knows its audience
Each service in your catalogue is tagged residential, commercial, or both. A residential window clean and a commercial shopfront clean are different services with different legal scope, different exclusions, and different method notes — because they genuinely are different work with different liability.
When you build a service line, you match the service's audience to the job. A commercial building wash-down does not end up on a home, and a domestic bathroom clean does not end up on an office tower. Services tagged both — gutter clearing, pest control, handyman work, pressure washing — sit in one place and serve either.
3. Payment behaviour defaults by type — then you override it
This is where the platform has an opinion, and it is the residential one: homeowners pay on the day.
So a residential client defaults to instant invoicing — the visit is marked complete, the invoice is raised, and the client is emailed a card-payment link, with no operator approval step in between. Commercial, strata, and body-corporate clients default to off, because a facilities manager wants a monthly summary, not a card link per visit.
Both defaults are overridable per client. The default is a starting posture, not a rule, and it is inert unless the client's invoicing cadence is per-job — a client on consolidated or manual invoicing never instant-invoices, whatever the type says.
4. How the price is presented
A commercial buyer wants the annual figure. A homeowner looking at a $30 clean can be frightened off by "$780 per year" even though it is the same price they were always going to pay.
Proposals therefore have presentation views. One leads with a bold annual investment figure. One shows a twelve-month year-at-a-glance so the client sees the rhythm. One shows the per-visit price as the hero with no annual and no monthly total at all — built specifically for the price-sensitive small job.
Presentation only. The price the client pays is identical in every view.
What is deliberately the same
Everything else, and that is the point.
| Residential | Commercial | |
|---|---|---|
| Recurring schedules | Same engine | Same engine |
| Dispatch and work orders | Same | Same |
| Contractor assignment and pay | Same | Same |
| Compliance gating on contractors | Same | Same |
| Completion photos and notes | Same | Same |
| Invoicing cadences | All three available | All three available |
| Payment terms | Same closed set | Same closed set |
| Statements and payment links | Same | Same |
| Bank feed and reconciliation | Same | Same |
Invoicing cadence in particular is a per-client choice, not a segment rule. A residential client on a monthly maintenance plan can be set to one consolidated invoice when the month's last visit completes — the cadence usually associated with commercial contracts. Nothing stops you.
Payment terms come from one closed set for every client type: prepay, due on receipt, 7 days, 14 days, 30 days, or a custom day count.
The tax detail worth knowing (Australia)
A commercial client has an ABN. A residential client does not, and asking a homeowner for one would be absurd.
The invoice validator understands this. The recipient's ABN is only required above a threshold — a domestic invoice below it passes validation with no recipient ABN at all, while a large commercial invoice is held until the recipient's details are complete. Your own supplier ABN is always required, on every invoice, to either type.
You do not configure this per client. It follows the amount and the jurisdiction.
Sites work the same way, at different scale
A home is one site. A facilities contract might be a dozen sites under one client, each with its own access notes, its own contacts, and its own service lines — invoiced together or separately as you choose.
The model is identical. A residential client simply has one site, so the multi-site machinery stays out of your way until you need it.
Mixed books, mixed delivery
Whether the work is subcontracted or done by your own crew is a separate axis again, and it also cuts across both segments. You can subcontract commercial work and self-perform residential, or the reverse, or split by service type — the finance engine derives contractor pay from the rate model on whoever holds the line, and an in-house crew can be modelled so the full client rate stays in house.