SparkBiz User Manual

Everything you need to know about using SparkBiz. Click any section in the sidebar to jump straight there.

🚀 Getting Started

Register & Sign in

SparkBiz uses email and password authentication — no third-party login required.

  1. Go to login.html and click Create account.
  2. Enter your business name, ABN (optional), full name, email, and a password (minimum 8 characters).
  3. Click Create account →. SparkBiz sends a verification link to your email — you're not signed in yet.
  4. Open the email and click Verify email address. This confirms the address is really yours and signs you straight in to the Dashboard.
  5. To sign in on future visits, enter your email and password on the Sign in tab.
⚠️ Can't find the verification email? Check your spam or junk folder — it sometimes lands there on first send. You can also click Resend verification email on the sign-in form.
💡 Forgot your password? Click Forgot your password? on the sign-in form — a reset link will be emailed to you.

Trial & Plans

New accounts receive a 14-day free trial for each module. After the trial ends, you will need a paid plan to continue using that module.

Each SparkBiz tool can be purchased on its own. See the pricing page for current plans and prices.

To upgrade, click Upgrade from the Dashboard or visit the pricing page. Locked modules show a 🔒 icon in the navigation.

First-Time Setup

Before sending your first invoice, complete these steps in Settings:

  1. Business Details — add your business name, ABN, phone, address, and brand colour. These appear on every PDF you send.
  2. How clients can pay you (also in Business Details) — add your BSB/account, PayID, or BPAY details so clients know how to pay you.
  3. Email Settings — choose how invoices and other documents are sent. SparkBiz email works immediately with no setup. For your own address, connect Gmail, Outlook, or configure SMTP.

🧾 Invoice

Create an Invoice

  1. Go to Invoice in the navigation.
  2. Click + New Invoice (top right). A drawer opens from the right.
  3. Select an existing client from the dropdown, or type a new name to create one on the fly.
  4. Set the issue date (defaults to today, but you can pick an earlier date to backdate the invoice — e.g. to match when the work was actually done) and optional due date, then add one or more line items.
  5. GST (10%) is calculated automatically — you enter prices ex-GST.
  6. Click Save invoice. The invoice is saved as a draft.
ℹ️ To manage clients separately, click the Customers tab at the top of the Invoice page.
💡 Customer reference (set on the client, in the Customers tab) is optional and free-text — but if you turn on Settings → Document numbering → "Use each client's Customer reference for numbering", that client's invoices get numbered from it instead (e.g. ABC8B-0001) rather than the shared Invoice sequence. If you type in a reference that's already used by another client, you'll see a heads-up — you can still use it, and new invoices here will simply continue that client's numbering rather than restarting at 1, so numbers never collide.
ℹ️ The Saved Descriptions tab holds your personal library of reusable line-item descriptions. Anything new you type into a line item while creating an invoice is automatically saved there for next time — start typing in the Description field and matching saved descriptions appear as suggestions.
💡 The drawer also has Email subject and CC fields (click ✏ Edit to reveal the subject box). Email subject overrides your Settings default just for this invoice. CC lets you add up to 5 extra email addresses (comma-separated) to receive a copy — this covers both the invoice email and the paid receipt sent when you mark it paid. Leave either blank to use the normal behaviour.
💡 The issue date can be changed any time while the invoice is still a Draft — open ✏ Edit and adjust it there. Once the invoice is sent, the issue date locks and can no longer be changed.

Line item style — Qty × Price or Flat Amount

By default, invoices use Quantity × Unit price line items. If you'd rather enter a single amount per line, switch to Flat Amount mode in Settings → Business Details → Invoice appearance & behaviour.

⚠️ This setting only affects new invoices from the moment you change it. Invoices you've already created keep the line-item style they were created with, everywhere — on screen, in the detail drawer, on the PDF, and if resent. There is no way to convert an existing invoice's style short of recreating it.

Editing & deleting invoices

Only Draft invoices can be edited or deleted — once an invoice has been sent, its numbering and content are locked in. Find the draft in the list and use ✏ Edit or the two-step ✕ Delete action. Deleting a draft permanently removes it (not just cancels it), so the next invoice number won't skip a gap.

Bulk Excel Upload

Upload many invoices at once from a spreadsheet. Click ⬆ Bulk Upload in the Invoice toolbar.

Your spreadsheet must include these columns (column names are flexible — you will map them in the next step):

  • Client name, Client email
  • Description, Quantity, Unit price (ex-GST)
  • Invoice group — rows with the same client + group number are merged into one invoice
  • Optional: Company, Phone, Address, Due date, Notes

After mapping your columns and selecting your file, choose how to create the invoices:

  • 📧 Create & Send — creates all invoices and emails them to clients immediately using your configured email method.
  • 💾 Create & Save — creates all invoices as drafts. No emails are sent. You can review and send them individually from the invoice list.
💡 Download the SparkBiz template via the ↓ Download template (.xlsx) link inside the upload drawer — it has all the required column names pre-filled.
💡 The mapping step also has an Issue date (whole batch) field — leave it blank to use today's date for every invoice in the batch, or set one date to backdate the entire batch at once (handy when importing a month's worth of invoicing after the fact).
💡 Same person at different companies? Use the same group number — they will still get separate invoices because company is part of the grouping key.
⚠️ Phone numbers with leading zeros (e.g. 0412 345 678) are preserved — make sure the column is formatted as Text in Excel before uploading.

Send Invoices

To send a single invoice, find it in the list and click Send. To send multiple at once, tick the checkboxes and click Bulk send in the toolbar.

The email is sent using whichever method you configured in Settings (SparkBiz email, Gmail, Outlook, or SMTP). The client receives a PDF attachment and a reply-to address pointing back to you.

Once sent, the invoice status changes to Sent. When the client opens the email, status updates to Viewed.

💡 Clicking Resend on an invoice that's already been sent marks the email as a reminder — the subject gets a "Reminder:" prefix and the wording makes clear it's a follow-up, not a duplicate of the original invoice.

Mark Paid, Partial Payments & Undo

  1. Find the invoice in the list. In the Actions column, click Mark paid to settle the whole remaining balance in one click.
  2. A confirmation button appears inline — click it again to confirm. The invoice status changes to Paid.
  3. Made a mistake? Click Undo on the paid invoice (also two-step confirmed) to wipe every payment and revert it.
ℹ️ The Total paid stat box shows the all-time sum of all paid invoices for your business.
ℹ️ By default, marking an invoice paid automatically emails the client a copy stamped PAID. Turn this off in Settings → Business Details → Invoice appearance & behaviour → Paid invoice email if you'd rather send it yourself. Either way, downloading the invoice PDF always shows the PAID stamp once it's marked paid.

Need to send (or re-send) the paid receipt at any time? Click 📧 Send next to a Paid invoice in the list, or Send Paid Invoice in its detail drawer — this works regardless of the automatic-send setting above.

Recording a partial payment (e.g. a deposit)

If a customer pays in instalments — say a $2,000 deposit now and the rest later — don't use Mark Paid for the first amount. Instead:

  1. Click the 💰 button next to the invoice (shown for any Sent or Overdue invoice), or open the invoice and scroll to the Payments section.
  2. Enter the amount actually received, the date, and an optional note (e.g. "Deposit"), then click Record payment.
  3. The invoice stays Sent — a "Partial: $X of $Y" note appears under its status, and the list/detail drawer both show the running Paid to date and Balance due.
  4. Repeat for each further instalment. The moment a payment brings the balance to exactly $0, the invoice automatically becomes Paid — same PAID email/stamp as the one-click flow above.
ℹ️ Every payment is listed individually with a date, note, and its own ✕ to remove just that one entry — handy for correcting a mis-typed amount without wiping out other legitimate payments (unlike Undo above, which clears everything on the invoice).
ℹ️ Downloading or resending the invoice PDF while it's only partially paid shows a PAYMENT RECEIVED stamp (not PAID) plus the Paid-to-date/Balance-due figures — never worded as if the whole invoice were settled. No automatic email goes out for a partial payment; use ↻ Resend any time you want the customer to see an updated copy.

Bank Reconciliation

Automatically match bank transactions to outstanding invoices. Click the Bank Reconcile tab next to the Invoices tab.

  1. Download a CSV export from your bank's online portal (CBA, ANZ, NAB, Westpac, or Macquarie supported).
  2. Drag and drop (or browse) the CSV file. SparkBiz detects your bank automatically.
  3. Review the matches: Auto-matched (≥85% confidence) are pre-selected. Review needed (40–84%) require your approval. No match (<40%) are skipped.
  4. Tick the transactions you want to confirm and click Apply reconciliation. Matched invoices are marked Paid.

Export & CSV

Click ↓ Export CSV in the Invoice toolbar to download a spreadsheet of all visible invoices (respects any active filters). The export includes invoice details and all line items.

🏗️ Variations

Create a Project

Every variation must belong to a project. Click the Projects tab at the top of the Variations page, then click + New Project.

Fill in the project name, site address, homeowner name, homeowner email, and optionally a builder reference number. The homeowner email is where approval requests will be sent.

💡 You can edit the homeowner email later from within any variation's detail drawer — all variations under that project will reflect the change.
💡 Builder reference is optional and free-text — but if you turn on Settings → Document numbering → "Use each project's Builder reference for numbering", this project's variations get numbered from it instead (e.g. ABC8B-0001) rather than the shared Variation sequence. If you type in a reference that's already used by another project, you'll see a heads-up — you can still use it, and new variations here will simply continue that project's numbering rather than restarting at 1, so numbers never collide.

Create a Variation

  1. Click + New Variation in the toolbar.
  2. Select the project this variation belongs to.
  3. Enter a description of the work, the original contract price, and the new price after the variation. SparkBiz calculates the Variation Amount (the change in price) automatically.
  4. Optionally attach supporting files — photos, drawings, or PDFs — using the file upload zone at the bottom of the drawer (see Attachments below).
  5. Choose how to create the variation:
    📧 Create & Send — sends the approval request to the homeowner immediately.
    💾 Create & Save — saves it as a Draft with no email sent. You can send it later from the variation list or its detail drawer.

Variations are auto-numbered (VAR-0001, VAR-0002, …). The approval link in the email expires after 7 days. Use Resend approval from the variation's detail drawer to issue a fresh link.

💡 The drawer also has an Email subject field — overrides your Settings default just for this variation's approval-request email.
⚠️ The CC field only adds recipients to the confirmation email sent after the homeowner approves or declines — never to the initial approval-request email itself. This is deliberate: that email carries the one live decision link, and it's shared (not personalised per recipient), so CC'ing more people onto it would let anyone with the link approve or decline on the homeowner's behalf.
💡 Advanced options also has a Price display setting — Show full pricing (the default: Original price / New price / Variation Amount, or Before/After columns for line items) or Show difference only, which hides the actual dollar figures and shows just the Variation Amount, on the work order PDF and the public approval page. It defaults to whatever you've set in Settings → Variations appearance & behaviour, but you can override it per variation right here.

Preview Before Sending

Open any variation (click its number) and use the two buttons at the bottom of the detail drawer, next to ✏ Edit and 📧 Send for Approval:

  • 👁 Preview Link — opens, in a new tab, exactly the page your homeowner will see when they click the link in the approval email: description, prices (respecting Hide price and Show difference only), line items, notes and attachments. A yellow Preview strip across the top reminds you it's a preview, and the Approve/Decline buttons are disabled so nothing can be recorded by accident.
  • 📄 Preview PDF — opens the work order PDF as the homeowner would receive it. Once the variation has been approved or declined, the PDF also includes the decision record.
💡 Both work for drafts that haven't been sent yet — a good last check before you click Send for Approval. The Preview strip also has its own 📄 Preview PDF button.

Attachments

You can attach supporting files to a variation when creating it — for example, site photos, engineer drawings, or quote PDFs. These files are included in the approval request email so the homeowner can review them before deciding.

  1. In the New Variation drawer, drag and drop files onto the upload zone, or click it to browse.
  2. Accepted file types: JPEG, PNG, WebP, PDF, Word (.docx). Maximum 5 files, 3 MB total.
  3. Each file appears in the list with its name and size. Click ✕ next to a file to remove it before submitting.
  4. The files are sent to the homeowner with the approval request email (and again with the resend if you resend the request).
ℹ️ Attachments are kept on file in SparkBiz permanently, regardless of outcome — whether the homeowner approves, declines, or the variation is cancelled.
⚠️ Files are stored securely in cloud storage. Keep total attachments under 3 MB — large images should be resized or compressed before uploading.

Approval Workflow

The homeowner receives an email with a unique link. Clicking it opens a public page (no login required) showing the variation details. They can:

  • Approve — records their name, timestamp, and IP address. Status changes to Approved.
  • Decline — also recorded with full audit trail. Status changes to Declined.

Once approved or declined, the link cannot be used again. The approval is recorded in compliance with the Electronic Transactions Act 1999.

⚠️ Approval links expire after 7 days. If the homeowner hasn't responded, use Resend approval from the drawer — this generates a new 7-day link.

Work Orders

When a homeowner approves a variation, SparkBiz automatically generates a signed work order PDF and emails it to both the homeowner and you (the builder) via SparkBiz email.

The PDF includes the variation details, approval timestamp, IP address, and homeowner name — forming a legally-documented record under the Electronic Transactions Act 1999.

If the variation includes GST, the PDF (and the homeowner's approval page) shows it in a highlighted line under the prices — e.g. "Revised price of $2,700.00 includes $245.45 GST." With Show difference only and GST-inclusive prices, it states the GST in the Variation Amount instead — e.g. "Variation Amount of +$2,550.00 includes $231.82 GST."

You can view the approval record at any time by clicking the variation number to open its detail drawer.

✍️ E-Sign

E-Sign is a scoped alternative to services like DocuSign — upload an existing PDF (a contract, a tax return) and get it electronically signed by one or more people. Unlike Invoice and Variations (which generate PDFs from your own data), E-Sign works with any PDF you already have.

Upload a Document

  1. Go to E-Sign in the navigation and click + New Document.
  2. Drag and drop your PDF onto the upload zone, or click to browse. Give the document a title.
  3. Add each recipient — name, email, and role (see Recipients & roles below). Signers can sign in any order by default; use Signing order & sequence if you need a specific order.
  4. The document is created as a Draft — nothing is sent yet until you design fields and click Send.
💡 Instead of building from scratch, you can start from a saved Template — see Templates at the end of this section.
💡 A draft document's row in the list also has a ✎ Prepare button — it jumps straight to that document's recipient list (add/edit name, email, role, sequence) without opening the full detail drawer first.

Recipients & Roles

Each person you add to a document has a role, chosen from a dropdown on the recipient row (in both the New Document drawer and the document's detail drawer while it's still a Draft):

  • Needs to sign (the default) — gets their own private signing link, has fields placed for them in the designer, and can be given a signing sequence number. The document only completes once every signer has signed.
  • Receives a copy — signs nothing. No signing link, no fields, no sequence. They're simply emailed the final signed PDF once every signer has completed. Use this for an accountant, a project manager, or anyone who just needs the finished document on file.
ℹ️ A document needs at least one Needs to sign recipient before it can be sent. Switching a recipient to Receives a copy while designing will remove any fields already placed for them.
💡 Each recipient row has a ⠿ drag handle on the left — drag a row up or down to arrange the list visually however you like. This is purely a display order and never changes anyone's Sequence number, so typing a new Sequence value won't make the list jump around. Click ⇅ Rearrange by sequence at the top of the Recipients section whenever you want the list to snap back to match everyone's current Sequence.

Design Fields

From the document's detail drawer, click Design fields to open the field designer. Your PDF is rendered page by page in the browser, with a fixed left panel for choosing who and what you're placing.

  1. In the left panel, pick the active signer from the dropdown — every field you place is assigned to whoever is active. Below it is a checklist of all signers, listed in signing-sequence order, with a live count of how many fields each has (amber when zero). "Receives a copy" recipients don't appear here — they never get fields.
  2. Choose a field type: Signature, Initials, Date, Text, or Checkbox.
  3. Click anywhere on the page to place the field. Drag it to reposition, or drag the corner handle to resize.
  4. For an exact size, click a placed field to select it — the left panel shows Width, Height, X and Y boxes (as a percentage of the page) you can type into.
  5. Mark fields Required if the signer must fill them in before completing.
  6. Need the same field on many pages (e.g. initials on every page of a contract)? Click the ⧉ button on a placed field and enter a page range like 5-17, 20-23 — SparkBiz places an independent copy of that field on every page in the range.
  7. Click Preview to see the page exactly as one signer will — only that signer's fields, non-interactive, with a "Next field" jump button. Switch signer in the panel to preview someone else. Click Keep editing to exit.
  8. Click Save Layout when done. This is only available while the document is still a Draft.
ℹ️ Every signer needs at least one field before the document can be sent.

Send for Signing

Once every signer has at least one field, click Send on the document. Each signer gets their own private invite email with a unique signing link, sent using whichever email method you've configured in Settings. "Receives a copy" recipients are not emailed yet — they get the finished PDF once everyone has signed.

The document status changes to Sent. If sending fails for a particular signer (e.g. bad email address), SparkBiz reports which ones succeeded and which failed rather than stopping the whole batch.

⚠️ Once sent, you can no longer edit the field layout or delete the document. To make changes, upload a fresh document instead.
💡 The New Document drawer has an Email subject field to override your Settings default for this document's invite email. E-Sign has no free-text CC field like Invoice and Variations — to send the finished document to someone who doesn't sign, add them as a recipient with the Receives a copy role instead.

Signing Order & Sequence

By default, all signers can sign in any order — every invite goes out immediately and the document finalises once everyone has signed.

If you need people to sign in a specific order — for example Builder and Architect first, then Home Owners, then the Bank last — give each signer a Sequence number when adding them (leave it blank for "any time"):

  • Signers in Sequence 1 are invited immediately when you send.
  • Signers in Sequence 2 only receive their invite once every Sequence 1 signer has completed — and so on for later numbers.
  • Signers sharing the same sequence number can still sign in any order relative to each other.
  • A signer whose turn hasn't come up yet sees a "not your turn yet" message if they open their link early.
💡 Leaving every signer's Sequence blank reproduces the any-order behaviour exactly — sequencing is entirely optional. "Receives a copy" recipients never have a sequence.

What Signers See

Each recipient gets a unique link — no login required. The link is valid for 30 days. They will see:

  1. A consent screen — "I agree to sign this document electronically" — which must be accepted before any field becomes fillable.
  2. The PDF rendered in the browser with their own fields shown as fillable — plus, if anyone signed before them, that person's already-completed fields appear too (read-only, labelled with their name), so the document reads as it will look once everyone's done. Fields belonging to someone whose turn hasn't come up yet are never shown.
  3. Signature and initials fields open a signing pad — draw with mouse/touch, or type your name and have it rendered in a cursive script.
  4. Date fields default to today (editable); text fields are plain inputs; checkboxes are real tick boxes.
  5. A floating "Next field" button shows how many required fields are still empty and jumps straight to the next one.
  6. Once every required field is filled, Complete Signing becomes enabled.

Completion, Decline & Download

Once every signer has completed signing, SparkBiz automatically:

  • Flattens every captured signature/initials/date/text/checkbox onto the original PDF pages.
  • Appends a Certificate of Completion page listing every signer's name, email, IP address, and timestamp (in the order they actually signed).
  • Emails the final signed PDF to every recipient — signers and "receives a copy" recipients alike — and to your business email.

Document status becomes Completed, and you can click Download signed PDF from the detail drawer at any time afterwards.

⚠️ If any one signer declines, the whole document dies immediately — status becomes Declined, every recipient and your business are notified, and any signatures already captured are kept for your records but never assembled into a final PDF. There's no "reset to draft" — upload a fresh document to retry.

Resending & Copies

From the document list, each row shows an action button next to View that matches where the document is up to — no need to open the detail drawer:

  • Draft — 📧 Send sends it out for the first time.
  • Sent, not everyone has signed yet — ↻ Resend issues a fresh signing link with a new 30-day window to whoever hasn't signed, and only actually emails people whose turn it currently is. Anyone still waiting on an earlier signer in the sequence isn't emailed early — they'll get their normal "your turn" email once it's genuinely their turn.
  • Completed — 📧 Send copy re-emails the already-signed final PDF to everyone who was on the document (signers and "receives a copy" recipients alike) — handy when someone asks for another copy. This doesn't regenerate the PDF or change anything about the document.

The same three actions are also available from inside a document's detail drawer.

Templates

If you send the same document to different people over and over — the same engagement letter to each new client, say — save it as a template so you don't re-place the fields every time. A template stores the PDF, a set of placeholder roles (people slots), and the whole field layout.

The E-Sign page has a Documents / Templates tab strip at the top.

Save a document as a template

  1. Open any document that already has recipients and fields, and click 💾 Save as template in its detail drawer.
  2. Give the template a name, and a label for each role (e.g. "Client", "Accountant") — the person's actual name and email are not stored, just the slot.

Start a new document from a template

  1. On the Templates tab, click New document on the template you want.
  2. Enter a title and fill in a real name and email for each role.
  3. SparkBiz creates a Draft document with the PDF, recipients, and every field already in place — ready to review and Send, or tweak in the designer first.

From the Templates tab you can also rename or delete a template. Deleting a template never affects documents already created from it.

📨 E-Request

A quick way to send a free-text email — a checklist, a form request, a reminder — to a batch of your Invoice clients or Variation homeowners. Available to any account with Invoice and/or Variations active.

Templates

E-Request has two tabs: Templates and Log. Templates is a reusable library of name/subject/body combinations — not tied to any one module, since the same wording can be sent to either audience. Create, edit, or delete templates here; deleting is a hard delete with a two-step confirmation. Each row also has a green Send button, which is how you actually message people — see below.

Sending a Request

  1. On the Templates tab, click the green Send button on the template you want to use. This opens the send drawer.
  2. Under "Who's this for?", pick a module from the dropdown — Invoice or Variations. Nothing is selected by default. A locked module (one you don't have active) is greyed out in the list.
  3. Under "Who do you want to message?", click the recipients dropdown and use the search box to find people by name or email. Tick as many as you like — the dropdown stays open while you pick, and the button above it shows how many are currently selected.
  4. Subject and Message are pre-filled from the template but stay fully editable. Optionally attach up to 5 files (3 MB total, JPEG/PNG/WebP/PDF/Word).
  5. Click Send. SparkBiz reports how many sent successfully and lists any failures, right there in the drawer.
ℹ️ Attachments here are sent and then discarded — they are never saved to the template or stored anywhere in SparkBiz.

Send Log

The Log tab shows a full history of every request actually sent — recipient name/email, which module, template used (if any), subject, and timestamp — searchable and filterable.

⚙️ Settings

Business Details

Go to Settings → Business details to update:

  • Business name — appears on all PDFs and email subjects.
  • ABN — printed on invoices and work orders.
  • Phone, address & website — website is optional; when filled in, it's shown alongside your phone/address everywhere those already appear (PDFs and outgoing emails).
  • Brand colour — the header colour on your invoice and work order PDFs. Use the colour picker or enter a hex code (e.g. #1D9E75).
  • Logo — upload a JPEG, PNG, or WebP (max 500 KB) to replace the plain business-name header on every PDF you send. It isn't added to your emails automatically — if you want it there, add it as a footer logo (see Email footer). Use Remove logo to revert to the text header.
  • Timezone — used for timestamps on E-Sign's Certificate of Completion. Choose whichever of the five Australian zones matches your state (Sydney/Melbourne/Canberra/Hobart all share the same rules as "Australia/Sydney").
  • Invoice appearance & behaviour — choose whether new invoices use Quantity × Unit price or a single Flat Amount per line (see Invoice → Line item style), and whether Paid invoice email sends automatically when you mark an invoice paid (see Invoice → Mark Paid & Undo).

Document Numbering

Also in Settings → Business Details, the Document numbering card lets you set your own numbering format for each module — Invoice, Variations, and E-Sign each get their own independent settings:

  • Prefix — e.g. INV-, PAY-
  • Padding — how many digits the number is padded to (4–8), e.g. 0001
  • Starting number — useful when migrating from an old numbering system; SparkBiz will never issue a number lower than this
  • Year — No year; Calendar year (e.g. INV-20260001, resets every 1 January); or Financial year (e.g. INV-25260001 for the year running 1 Jul 2025 – 30 Jun 2026, resets every financial-year rollover)

If any module is set to Financial year, set the Financial year start month once at the top of the card — it's shared across all three modules, since a business only has one financial year. Most Australian businesses use July.

💡 A live example number updates as you change these settings, so you can see exactly what your next document number will look like before saving.
⚠️ Changing these settings only affects documents created from now on — already-issued numbers never change. You can also type a specific number by hand when creating any document, right up until it's sent.

Variations only — right below the Variations numbering settings is a toggle: "Use each project's Builder reference for numbering." When it's on, any project that has a Builder reference set (see Create a Project) numbers its variations from that reference — e.g. ABC8B-0001, ABC8B-0002 — instead of the shared Variation sequence above. A project left with no Builder reference always falls back to the shared sequence, whether this toggle is on or off.

💡 If two different projects happen to use the same Builder reference, SparkBiz doesn't let them collide — it just treats them as one shared counter, so the second project's numbers continue on from wherever the first one left off (e.g. if project A is already up to ABC8B-0100, project B's first variation becomes ABC8B-0101, not ABC8B-0001). You'll still see a heads-up in the project form so you know it's shared.

Invoice only — the Invoice numbering settings have the same kind of toggle: "Use each client's Customer reference for numbering." It works identically, just keyed off the client's own Customer reference (set in the Customers tab) instead of a project's Builder reference — a client with no Customer reference always falls back to the shared Invoice sequence, and two clients sharing the same reference continue one counter rather than colliding, exactly like Variations above. On by default for every tenant.

Email Settings

Go to Settings → Email Settings to choose how emails are sent. Four options are available:

MethodHow it worksSetup required
SparkBiz email Sent via SparkBiz's own mail service. From address shows your business name. None — works immediately
Gmail Sent from your own Gmail address. Requires OAuth consent (send-only — SparkBiz never reads your emails). Click Connect Gmail account
Outlook / Microsoft 365 Sent from your Outlook, Hotmail, or Microsoft 365 work email. Click Connect Outlook / Microsoft 365
Custom SMTP Use your own mail server — cPanel hosting, Zoho, or any provider that gives you SMTP credentials. Enter server, port, username & password. Use port 587 (STARTTLS) or 465 (SSL).
💡 Use Send test email after configuring SMTP to confirm the settings work before sending real documents.

Email Subjects

Go to Settings → Email Settings → Email Subjects (below the email sending method card) to customize the subject line SparkBiz uses for each email your business sends — one card per email type, grouped by module (Invoice, Variations, E-Sign).

  1. Each card shows the current subject as read-only text. Click ✏ Edit to change it.
  2. You can include placeholders like {invoice_number} or {business_name} — SparkBiz fills these in automatically with the real values when the email is actually sent.
  3. Reset to default reverts a card back to SparkBiz's original wording.
ℹ️ This is your business-wide default. Invoice and Variations also let you type a one-off subject for a specific document when you create it — see each module's own section below for details. If you leave that field blank, your Settings default here is used.

Payment Methods

In the Settings → Business Details tab, scroll down to How clients can pay you to add the payment options that appear on every invoice:

  • Bank transfer (EFT) — BSB and account number
  • PayID — phone, email, or ABN
  • BPAY — biller code and optional reference (auto-uses invoice number if left blank)

You can fill in as many methods as you accept. Leave blank any you don't use — only filled-in methods appear on the invoice.

Manage Subscription

Go to Settings → Manage Subscription to see the active/inactive status of each module you can own — Invoice and Variations (E-Sign is billed the same way but as its own standalone product).

Click Manage subscription on Stripe → to open Stripe's hosted customer portal, where you can update your card, view invoices/receipts, or cancel a module. Cancelling keeps access until the end of your current paid period.

Want to add a module you don't currently have? Click View plans → to go to the pricing page.

Change Password

Go to Settings → Change Password. Enter your current password, then your new password (minimum 8 characters) twice, and click Update password.

If you've forgotten your current password, sign out and use Forgot your password? on the login page instead.

❓ FAQ

Can I use SparkBiz on mobile?

Yes — the web app is mobile-responsive. Open it in your mobile browser and add it to your home screen for easy access. On a phone, invoice and variation line items are shown as one card per line, with full-size Qty and price boxes so you can see what you're typing.

Does SparkBiz calculate GST for me?

Yes, for invoices. You enter prices ex-GST and SparkBiz adds 10% automatically. The invoice PDF shows subtotal, GST, and total separately.

Is variation approval legally binding?

Approval via the SparkBiz link is recorded under the Electronic Transactions Act 1999 (Cth). The approval record includes the homeowner's name, timestamp, and IP address. We recommend consulting your solicitor for advice on your specific contract and jurisdiction.

Is E-Sign legally binding?

E-Sign signatures are captured with a consent step, IP address, and timestamp, and the signed PDF ends with a Certificate of Completion listing every signer's details in the order they signed — similar in spirit to services like DocuSign. As with Variations, we recommend consulting your solicitor for advice on your specific documents and jurisdiction.

What banks are supported for reconciliation?

CBA, ANZ, NAB, Westpac, and Macquarie. The bank is detected automatically from the CSV column names when you upload.

What happens when my trial ends?

After your 14-day trial, you will need a paid plan to access that module. Your data is preserved — you just can't create or send new documents until you upgrade.

Can I have multiple users on one account?

Currently SparkBiz supports one login per business. Multiple-user support is on the roadmap.

How do I contact support?

Email us at hello@sparkbiz.com.au and we'll get back to you as soon as we can.