Events may contain many different elements - meeting room bookings; catering; hotel room bookings, etc. This eventually leads to having many charges and it is important for you to understand how they show up on the folio internally and how they can be represented on the customer invoice. Here is a folio which has charges for all of the above elements.
Segmentation of charges
The indicated lines are what we call the 'source' of the charges:
- (1) - these are charges that have been posted directly in the event folio - through the 'Charge' button on the event page.
- (2) - these are Meeting room booking charges posted through the 'Charge' button of the Meeting room activity. As you can see, the line indicates exactly the meeting room booking these charges are related to. You can choose to post to any of the existing folios or add a new folio and posted the charges there.
- (3) - these are Catering charges posted through the 'Charge' button of the Catering activities. As you can see, the line indicates exactly to which catering activity these charges are related to. You can choose to post to any of the existing folios or add a new folio and posted the charges there.
- (4) - these are charges of a hotel room booking that were transferred to the event folio as they will be paid along with the rest of the event. As you can see, the line indicates exactly from which booking they came from.
Now you know what you, as a user of Clock PMS+, will see on an Event folio internally and how the charges are separated.
Preview mode of a folio/invoice
Let's now see the Guest/customer-facing side. To see the Guest-facing folio/invoice, access the folio and click on the 'Preview' button on the top right corner.
Various charge presentation options
As you've seen in our Folio articles, you can choose between various 'View' options for presenting the charge on the invoice depending on your preference and/or local legislation requirements. However, please note a couple of specifics related to Event invoices.
- the first 4 'View' options (1) will always show the charges separated by their source.
- the 2 'Packaged by' view options (2) will remove the 'source'
Those 2 view options are called 'Packaged...' because you have the opportunity to 'package' several items/services into one line as long as they have the same 'print text' and quantity.
By using the example above, let's consider that we want to combine the Lunch and Coffee Break into one line called 'Catering'. Internally, we will still have them separate, but for the guest invoice, they need to be combined.
To achieve this, apply the same 'Print text' to the charges you want to combine.
Note: To avoid manual intervention and editing , you can pre-configure the 'Print text' when creating the charge templates. However, If you have the same service, but need to show different print texts for different situations you either need to change the print text manually in the event, or create several charge templates for the same service with different print texts.
Important: The 'Packaged by' view modes package items/service by their 'Print text' AND 'Quantity'. If two charges have the same print text but different quantity, they will be shown on separate lines.
This allows you to combine charges which are calculated 'per person', while flat charges such as the cost of meeting room hire, will be shown separately.
