Introduction
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.
Contents
- Bill Run
- Invoice Filters
- Issue Date and Due Date
- Billing Period Start
- Start Date and End Date
- Preview & Export Invoices
- Apply a discount to all invoices
- Apply a custom property
Bill Run
In order to do a bill run, you can go to Billing & Products/Invoices and click the Bill run button.
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 would like 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 that will be generated. For example, if you change the Issue Date to be 1st of May, this will be propagated to all invoices in the list and all of them will have the 1st of May as the Issue Date.
Likewise, if you want to change a field only for certain invoices, you can click on a specific invoice and change it only for that one invoice. Clicking on an invoice number will actually open a dialog with a detailed breakdown of everything that's included in the invoice, and will also allow you to change each property as well as 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, but the drawback is that the issue date of the invoices will be for the current month and not for the month your customers are actually paying for. This leads to invoices being 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 which allow you to overcome this problem. Let's say you are charging 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 for which your customers are paying.
In this case, 5 days before the 1st of the month, you create a manual bill run and set the Issue Date field to be the 1st of the month you are billing for. Do all other adjustments you might want to do and 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
It's important to understand the difference between the Period Start field and the Billing Period Start Date. In the example shown above, the period start is the month of January 2019. However, the exact date of the month on which the period starts is specified elsewhere.
Navigate 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 Billing Period Start Date of the organization is the same as the Member 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 allows you to select a billing period for the manual bill run that will include all members.
Preview & Export Invoices
If you'd like to preview all of the invoices that you're going to 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, which will allow you to export all of the invoices that are going to be 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 you'll be able to take a detailed look at all the data contained in the invoices that you're about to generate with the manual bill run.
How to 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 will deduct from the total amount of the invoice, based on the percentage value that you've entered. For example, if you enter 20, then the total amount of the invoice will be reduced by 20%.
How to 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. Please see our article on Custom Properties for more information.
Each custom property you've created, that applies to invoices which will have a separate field in this section. The type of field depends on the type of property - more on that in the aforementioned article.
Once you set a value, it will be applied to all invoices issued by the bill run.
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