Billing and your data

BayDocket is one subscription that includes every feature — there are no tiers, add-on modules, or per-seat charges, only a choice between monthly and annual billing. This page covers managing that subscription, what happens if it lapses, and how to take a copy of your shop’s records at any time.

Role note: everything on this page is Owner territory. Payments & plan and Your data appear only in the Owner’s Settings; an Advisor’s Settings shows Scheduling only, and Technicians do not have a Settings page. See Staff and roles.

Subscribing

When you create a shop, the app asks you to subscribe before it unlocks.

1. Choose Monthly or Annual on the subscribe page. Annual is billed once a year at a discount.
2. Click Subscribe. Stripe’s checkout opens — card details are handled by Stripe, and BayDocket never sees them.
3. After you pay, you return to the app. A brief “Finishing up…” screen confirms the subscription with Stripe — usually a few seconds — and then the app opens.

If someone other than the Owner signs in while the shop has no subscription, they see a note asking them to have the Owner activate it.

Managing your subscription

Your plan lives in Settings, under Payments & plan. The strip at the top shows your price, a status badge (Active, Payment past due, or Canceled), whether you are on monthly or annual billing, and your next renewal date.

The plan strip: price, status, and renewal date, with Manage billing on the right.

The same section holds the processors your customers pay you through — see Getting paid online.

Update your card, view invoices, or cancel

1. Open Settings and choose Payments & plan.
2. Click Manage billing. The Stripe billing portal opens.
3. In the portal, update your payment method, view your past BayDocket invoices, or cancel the subscription.

Note: canceling takes effect at the end of the period you have already paid for, not immediately. Until then the plan strip reads “Cancels” with the date, and the app works exactly as before.

If a payment fails

When a renewal charge fails, a banner appears at the top of the app: “Payment failed — update your card.” Nothing is locked — the app keeps working while Stripe retries the card over the following days. Click Update card in the banner (or use Manage billing) to fix the payment method. If the retries run out, the subscription ends and the shop moves to read-only.

Read-only mode

When a subscription ends — whether you canceled or the retries ran out — your shop is not deleted and your sign-in still works. Instead:

• Every screen still opens. You can look up any customer, repair order, invoice, report, or message thread, exactly as you left them.
• Editing is off. Controls that would change something are disabled, and a banner explains why: “Subscription ended — your data is intact, browsing is read-only.”
• The records copy described below still works — see the tip there.

To come back, click Resubscribe in the banner and pay through the same Stripe checkout. Everything unlocks immediately, with your data exactly as you left it.

Take a copy of your records

You can save your shop’s records to your own computer at any time, as CSV files that open in Excel or any spreadsheet.

1. Open Settings and choose Your data.
2. Click Download .zip. The button reads “Preparing your file…” while the file is built — a few seconds for most shops.
3. Your browser saves one zip named with the date, like baydocket-export-2026-08-30.zip.

The Your data card. One click produces a single zip of CSV files plus a README.

There are no options to pick — the file always covers every record from your first day, so there is never a question of which rows you missed.

What is in the zip

Eight CSV files, plus a README.txt that explains them:

• customers.csv and vehicles.csv — your customer list and their vehicles.
• repair-orders.csv and ro-lines.csv — every repair order and every part and labor line on it, including open estimates. Declined jobs are present and marked, so work the customer turned down stays visible.
• invoices.csv, invoice-lines.csv, and invoice-tax-lines.csv — each invoice with its line items and per-rate tax breakdown. Voided invoices are present and flagged, because a void is part of the history.
• payments.csv — one merged money ledger covering payments, reversals, and deposits. Amounts are signed (a reversal is negative) so the column sums directly, and a counts_as_cash_received column marks which rows are real money in, so a deposit applied to an invoice is never counted twice.

The files are written for both people and software: money is in dollars with two decimals, dates are in your shop’s timezone (the one set in Shop settings), and every row carries both a stable reference and a human-readable name, so two customers with the same name never blur together. Invoice rows come from the frozen invoice itself, so they match the printed document — see Invoices and payments.

What is not in it

Not in the zip: photos, inspections, appointments, inventory, message history, canned jobs, vehicle recommendations, and the staff roster. There is also no accounting-format file. The README.txt inside the zip says the same, so anyone opening the file later knows its limits.

Tip: the Download .zip button stays live even when your subscription has ended and the rest of the app is read-only. Your records are yours; leaving BayDocket never costs you access to them.

Note: the zip is a snapshot of the moment you built it. Run it again whenever you want a current copy — there is no limit on how often.