The week your child hands you an invoice is the week you stop being the chore police.
The Payday Pack
Eight tools for running chores and pocket money at your place. Every one of them ready to print, and every one with a blank version so you can make it yours. $17.
You've probably already tried a chore chart.
Most of us have. It went up on the fridge in January with good intentions and coloured stickers.
By the third week nobody was filling it in, you were the only one who remembered it existed, and it stayed there until it went curly at the corners and someone quietly took it down.
The chart wasn't the problem. What was missing was everything around it.
A rate next to each job that doesn't get renegotiated every Saturday. Something the child does themselves instead of waiting to be told. A way to handle two kids at two ages without the word "unfair" being shouted down a hallway. And a plan for the week it falls over, because it will.
That's what this is.
Start with the invoices.
This is the piece I'd keep if you threw the rest away.
Before your child gets paid, they fill one in and hand it to you. Job, agreed rate, is it finished, signed by them.
Every chore chart in the world teaches a child to do a job. None of them teach the part that actually matters later, which is asking to be paid, properly, for work you've finished.
It ends two arguments before they start. There's no "I did do it", because it's written down. And there's no haggling afterwards, because the rate went on the form before the job started.
Two things happen that you didn't ask for. They stop asking for money for jobs they didn't really do, because writing it down makes it feel different. And they start noticing what things are worth, which is the whole point of everything I make.
Also, a seven year old handing you an invoice is one of the funniest and cutest things you'll see this year.
The Payday Pack
Two documents:
1. The Payday Pack (19 pages) walks you through how each tool works, the order to set it up in, what to do the week it collapses, how to run it across siblings, and the safety rules for anything with a motor or a cleaning product.
2. The Payday Pack Printables (15 pages) is the tools on their own (both pre-filled and blank), so you're not printing pages of reading to get to them.
What's inside:
✔ Job invoices: Your child bills you before they get paid.
✔ Chore charts: for ages 3 to 6, 7 to 9, and 10 and up. The older two have a paid section under the family jobs, so earning and helping stay visibly different things.
✔ Family job cards: The free ones. Cut out them out, stick up, and stop relitigating them.
✔ Paid job cards: each with a rate range and what "finished" means for that job.
✔ Seven challenge cards: for earning that isn't chores. Each one capped so a bright child can't farm it. And a bonus 8th one included which is about permission only, not payment!
✔ The rate card: Every job, every age band, one page for the fridge. This is the page that ends the negotiating.
✔ Week three: A four week restart for when it's already fallen apart, plus the seven ways it usually does and the fix for each.
✔ Siblings: The line that settles it, the scripts for both the younger one and the older one, and three things that prevent most of the arguments.
✔ The tracker. Up to 4 kids, 12 weeks, 1 easy tracking page.
Everything comes pre-filled and blank.
Every chart, card and rate sheet appears twice. Once filled in, so you can print it tonight and have the whole thing running by the weekend. Once blank, on the following page, so you can put your own jobs, your own rates and your own challenges on it.
Your house has jobs mine doesn't. A system you can't change or adapt is a system that lasts a fortnight.
What this will help you do:
✔ Get the whole thing set up in one afternoon instead of one job at a time
✔ Stop renegotiating what a job is worth every week
✔ Hand your kids something to fill in, so remembering isn't your job
✔ Keep spending under control, using the earning ceiling on the rate card
✔ Run it across two or three kids at different ages without a fight
✔ Get it going again when it stops, without starting from scratch
This is for you if:
👉 You've decided which jobs pay and now you have to actually run it
👉 Your last chore chart lasted about a fortnight
👉 You've got more than one child and the rates need to be different
👉 You'd rather print something tonight than design something on the weekend
Where this sits...
Paid or Not Paid? The Sorting Kit ($7) is the deciding. Which jobs are free, which ones pay, what each is worth. This pack is the running of it. The two were built to go together.
What's not in here is how much pocket money to give, how often, or how to split it between saving, spending and giving. That's a different decision, and there's no point paying twice for it. Pocket Money That Actually Works has all the answers and the best way to set up your pocket money system. It can be found here.
