One of the most important functionalities in OfficeRnD is billing your customers. This can happen either automatically or manually.
You may want to do a manual Bill Run if:
You want fine-grained control over the whole billing process (issuing, checking, sending).
You want to check the created invoices before sending them to your customers.
You want to control the Issue Date and Due Date of the invoices.
Please refer to the billing glossary if you are unfamiliar with any of the terms used in the article.
Bill Run
To execute a Bill Run, you can go to Billing & Products > Invoices and click Bill Run.
The Bill Run page opens with the following sections:
General Settings
More Options
Selection Summary
Preview Invoices
Invoice filters
The Bill Run section lets you change the following fields and parameters:
Invoice Services From - Select which location you want to generate invoices for.
Issue Date (of the invoices) and Due Date (of the payment)
For - Select the type of items to be invoiced (Fixed contract memberships, Monthly memberships, One-off fees)
Revenue Account - Select the revenue account(s) for the invoices. In one use case, this filter lets you raise all virtual office memberships in a bulk operation separately from the other fees and memberships.
Customers - Select the types of customers to be invoiced (Business, Personal).
Period start - Select the start of the billing period.
Invoices for - Select the duration of the billing period.
Fees Period - Collect all one-off fees in the selected period.
(Optional) Enable fees from previous periods.
Changing any of the fields on this screen will apply the new value to all invoices generated. For example, if you change the Issue Date to May 1, this will be propagated to all invoices in the list, and they will all have May 1 as the Issue Date.
Likewise, if you want to change a field only for certain invoices, you can click on a specific invoice number and change it only for that one invoice. Clicking on an invoice number will open a dialog with a detailed breakdown of everything included in the invoice. The dialog will also allow you to change each property and add or remove items.
Although this makes sense, many spaces charge their customers for the month to come but want to generate all invoices a few days earlier so their customers are notified of what they have to pay.
This is possible using both manual and automatic bill runs. However, the drawback is that the invoice issue date will be for the current month, not the month your customers are actually paying for. Thus, invoices will be shown as revenue for the current month.
Issue Date and Due Date
The manual Bill Run gives you great control over both Issue Date and Due Date properties, allowing you to overcome this problem. Let's say you charge your customers on the 1st of each month, but you want to generate the invoices 5 days earlier and send them through. You also want to see those invoices accounted for the month your customers pay.
In this case, you create a manual Bill Run five days before the first of the month and set the Issue Date field to the first of the month you are billing for. Make all other adjustments you might want to make, then click Generate Invoices.
All invoices are generated right away (5 days before the 1st), their Issue Date is correctly set (which means they will be accounted for the month you are billing for), and they are ready to be sent out to your customers.
Billing period start
Understanding the difference between the Period Start field and the Billing Period Start Date is important. In the example shown above, the period starts in January 2019. However, the exact date of the month on which the period starts is specified elsewhere.
Go to Settings > Billing Settings > Billing Rules and choose the Billing Period Start Date:
Start Date and End Date
The Start Date and End Date fields are visible when the organization's Billing Period Start Date is the same as the Member's Start Date (learn more). In this case, the platform doesn't know the exact time frame of the billing period, as every member has a different billing period. Hence, these fields allow you to select a billing period for the manual Bill Run that will include all members.
Preview and export invoices
If you'd like to preview all of the invoices you will generate after customizing the Bill Run, you can do so by using the Preview Invoices button. Once you click on it, all of the invoices that should be generated for the specified period and their options will be listed below.
Now that the invoices are generated, you'll be able to see an Export button on the right side of the screen, allowing you to export all invoices generated as PDF or CSV files.
For CSV exports, you can specify whether you'd like to:
Use an Export Preset.
Export the Member Custom Properties.
Summarize the invoice data i.e to see a single row per invoice), rather than have every single line item visible on a separate row in the exported table.
The export is very useful because it allows you to examine all the data contained in the invoices you'll generate with the manual Bill Run.
Apply a discount to all invoices issued by the Bill Run
If you'd like to update all invoices that are going to be issued by the Bill Run, you can click on More Options.
One of the most important options that you can use is to apply a discount to all invoices issued by the Bill Run. This can be done by entering a value in the Invoice Discount field. This amount will be deducted from the total amount of the invoice based on the percentage value that you've entered. For example, if you enter 20, the invoice's total amount will be reduced by 20%.
Note: You can only apply a 100% discount if you allow the creation of invoices with a 0 total and do not filter out line items with a price of 0. These settings can be found in Settings > Billing Settings > Billing Rules:
Apply a custom property to all invoices issued by the Bill Run
You can also use the More Options section to apply a custom property to all invoices issued by the Bill Run. For more information, please see our article on Custom Properties.
Each custom property you've created that applies to invoices will have a separate field in this section. The type of field depends on the property type - more on that in the aforementioned article.
Once you set a value, it will be applied to all invoices issued by the Bill Run.