This tool automates the monthly invoicing process, significantly reducing the need for manual operations. The module detects the charges for a selected period in the Guest or Company folios, transfers them to a new folio, closes it with the appropriate document type and - if possible - makes an automatic credit card payment.
The main case scenarios you will find helpful are:
- Long-term stays: if you invoice long-term guests with a price per night, you can use the this functionality. In this case, the booking is for a long period, and in the guest's main folio you have charges for each day according to their rate. You can easily and quickly invoice all such bookings for a given month.
- Companies with monthly invoicing contracts: If you have contracts with companies that are frequent guests and invoice for nights and services used in the past month, the this instrument can help you automate the process.
First step
First you need to designate the bookings, companies and events that are invoiced monthly. The booking, company and event has a new field "Monthly invoicing". In it, select on what basis you will invoice:
- "Next month" - if you are going to invoice the charges for the next month - for example for long-term bookings.
- "Previous month" - if you are invoicing the charges for the month that has already passed - for example for the contracts with the Company.
Second step
When the first of the month (or any other number of the month in which you invoice) arrives and it is time to issue the invoices, open the Monthly Invoicing screen. From the navigation menu, go to Other Features -> Monthly Invoicing.
- Select the customer group you will invoice - for example "Next month". If you use both models ("Next Month" and "Previous Month") for different customers, the invoicing will be done in two separate steps for each customer group.
- Select the Period you will invoice. In this case - next month, but the period can be any.
- For example, if, in addition to the nights, you are currently charging services to these customers' bills, select the beginning of the previous month and the end of the next month. This will combine the next month's nights and the current month's services into one invoice.
- If you want a separate invoice for the next month's nights and a separate invoice for the current month's services - do the monthly invoicing in two steps - once for the next month and once for the previous month.
- On the screen you will see all bookings, companies and events that have "Monthly invoicing" selected corresponding to the filter - in this case "Next month", and that have open charges for the selected period. You will also see the charge amounts.
- Select all bookings, companies and events you wish to invoice. You can use "Select all" or select them one by one. When you are ready, proceed to start the invoicing process by selecting the type of document you will issue.
What the system will do:
- Finding the charges: For each selected booking/company/event, the system will find all open charges within the selected period, searching all open folios. The selected period filters the charges by the service date of the charge. These charges correspond to the amount you see on the screen for each booking/company/event.
- New folio: This will create a new folio for the respective booking/company/event. The folio name corresponds to the selected invoicing period.
- Transfer: The found charges will be transferred to this new folio.
- Closing: The folio will be closed with the selected document type.
- Send document by email: The closed folio will be sent to the customer's email address. For this to happen, an email template must be selected in the document settings: All Settings -> Documents -> Auto send folio email with folio closure -> Document template.
- Automatic payment: If there is an active credit card (non-OTA) in the booking/company/event, a payment of the document balance will be initiated. This functionality requires you to use a payment gateway that allows merchant-initiated transactions.
- Payment confirmation email: Upon successful payment, the customer will automatically receive an email notification containing the payment details.
You do not need to wait for the system to process all the folios. You can safely close the screen and continue with other tasks - the invoicing process is already triggered and running in the background.
Tracking invoicing tasks
All tasks to the automatic closing and payment of folios can be found on the Archive tab. Here you can track the progress of each task. For more details use the "Open" button at the end of the row.
A new screen will open where you can monitor the status of each individual billing task. Click the Reload button to refresh the status of the tasks.
You can open the "Archive" at any time to make sure that all tasks have been completed successfully.
