A wedding planner once told Zikoko about her business, and one line has stayed with us: Nigerians like to do anyhow. If you are faint-hearted, you cannot succeed in this business.
Her stories will be familiar to anyone in this industry. A client who agreed to two hundred and fifty thousand and paid eighty up front, with the balance drifting into legend. A bride who booked five thousand naira hotel rooms and presented receipts for ten. Five weddings booked in one quarter, of which only three happened, and the refund conversations that followed. Her survival kit was a notes app where she recorded every phone call summary, then forwarded it to the client on WhatsApp as evidence. A one-woman court registry, maintained at midnight.
This is what informality costs. Not just money. The evenings spent reconstructing agreements from voice notes.
The folk rules that actually work
Planners who last in this business converge on the same rules, learned by scar tissue:
A contract before any work. Not for the courtroom, mostly. For the clarity. People behave better when the agreement exists in writing outside anybody's memory.
Serious money up front. The folk standard is seventy percent before work begins and the balance due well before the event day. Not at the venue. Never at the venue. The number of balances that have dissolved in the car park of a reception, amid transfer network issues and sudden phone deaths, would fill a lagoon.
Every change is a line item. The client who doubles the guest list two days before the event has changed the job. The paper should change with it. Scope creep dies in daylight.
A paper trail that builds itself. The Zikoko planner's notes-app system worked, but she was doing manually what software should do quietly: keeping a record nobody can dispute later.
What proper invoicing changes
An invoice is not just a request for money. It is a piece of choreography. It says: this is a business, these are the terms, this is where the professional relationship lives. Clients who receive proper invoices argue less, pay faster and respect the work more. Clients who receive a WhatsApp message saying madam the balance is remaining, argue more. Same money. Different theatre.
On Comtev, you raise an invoice in naira and your client pays from a private link. No account, no login, no app for them to download. The money lands, the record exists, and nobody is reconstructing anything from screenshots. What arrives in your balance withdraws to your Nigerian bank account.
It works in the other direction too. Clients you bill regularly can send invoices to you in the same place, so retainers and recurring arrangements live on one record with both sides visible. When a dispute comes, and in this industry a dispute always comes, you are not the planner with the notes app. You are the planner with the ledger.
The one rule we enforce so you cannot lose
Comtev has a single hard rule on invoices: an invoice cannot go below what you paid us for the work in it. It sounds small. It exists because of a real failure mode, the job that quietly loses money because the pricing was done at 1am under pressure from a persuasive client. The floor means a job can pay you little, but it cannot pay you negative.
Everything above the floor is yours to decide. You know your market, your client and your worth. We just make sure the arithmetic never runs backwards. If you want to see where the market sits, we collected the published figures on how much event planners charge in Nigeria.
Start before the wedding season does
Every planner has a story like the ones above. The difference between the ones who tell them laughing and the ones who tell them crying is usually paperwork, put in place before the trouble started. Deposits enforced by structure. Changes documented as they happen. Money moving through channels that remember.
Do anyhow will always exist. Your books do not have to participate.
FAQs
How does my client pay a Comtev invoice?
From a private link, by Paystack. They need no account and no login. The payment lands against the invoice and the record keeps itself. Paystack's fees, settlement times and starter limits are in Paystack for event planners.
Can I receive invoices from clients too?
Yes. Clients you bill regularly can send regular invoices to you on Comtev, so both directions of the money live on one record.
Can I enforce a deposit structure like 70/30?
You control what you invoice and when. Many planners raise a deposit invoice before work begins and a balance invoice due ahead of the event day, which mirrors the industry's folk standard.
What does invoicing on Comtev cost?
Comtev is free to run. You pay wholesale for message sends and guest-collection seats; what you charge your client, and what you invoice, is your own business. The one rule is that an invoice cannot go below what you paid us, so a job never quietly loses you money.
Is there a free way to make an invoice in naira?
Yes. The free invoice generator on comtev.ng makes a naira invoice PDF with optional VAT and your bank details, in your browser, with no account. When you want the client to pay from a link and the money to land in a balance you can withdraw, that is invoicing on Comtev, which is also free to run.