(MF-7) Changing Invoiced Amounts
Last updated
Last updated
Workshop Angel gives you the flexibility to modify the items and prices that comprise the details of an invoice. This can be great if you need to make changes after a client has booked, or if you are creating a customised invoice for something outside of an activity attendance.
You can also very easily move a booking from one activity to another if a client needs to move their attendance to another date.
Here are all the details you need to be able to make those changes...
There is one important technicality to look at before we discuss using these options...
If you are planning to use Workshop Angel to determine the sales your business has from an accounting point of view, there are two ways to do this. The method you use will be determined by how you operate your accounts from a tax point of view in the place your business is registered.
Invoice Based Accounting - this is where the record of your sales from an accounting perspective is based on the dates and amounts of the invoices you issue.
Payment Based Accounting - this is where the record of your sales from an accounting perspective is based on the dates and amounts of the payments you receive.
If you use Payment Based Accounting, then it is considered okay for you to change your invoices at any time, as this will not change the numbers you report in your accounts. In this case, you can use all the tools we describe below for changing Invoice Items.
If you use Invoiced Based Accounting, you need to be more careful with changing invoices, as you could be changing an invoice for a previous tax period which has already been reported to the tax authorities. In this situation, you will be also need to work with creating additional invoices and credit notes (invoices with a negative amount, so crediting the client.)
Invoice items are changed on the final "Invoice Items" tab when you view an invoice.
You are presented with a list of the individual items on the invoice, and options to edit, delete and add items. There is also the summary information about the invoice below so you can see the effect of any changes you make on the other aspects of the invoice.
In many cases for activity attendance, there will only be one invoice item for each attendee, but if you have also sold your attendees other optional extras such as accommodation or food then these will be listed as separate items too.
NOTE - You cannot add a complete new activity attendee to an invoice - you can only add items for existing attendees. To add a new attendee, that client needs to fill in the booking form in the usual way.
Note that:
You are not asked if you are sure you want to perform the deletion - the item is just deleted. But...
If you accidentally delete an item, you can restore it again using the method described below.
You are not able to delete the first item on an invoice, to prevent you from creating an invoice with no items or a booking with no attendees.
If you delete the attendance item for an attendee, then that attendee will be removed from the list of clients attending the activity.
If you delete the attendance item for an attendee, then any other items associated with their attendance will also be deleted, such as food or accommodation options.
There is a lot of potential with the ability to edit invoice items... some is extremely useful, and some you need to be particularly aware of as it can have a disruptive effect on your data.
The next few sections talk you through both possibilities!
The majority of invoice items are generated by a client selecting a specific price option at the time that they make their booking. When you come to edit invoice items, you have the option to not only change the description and the amount, but also the price item that this invoice item relates to.
Let's take a look at an example of this.
In the example booking we made in lesson MF-1, Freddy Full booked onto the "Finance Examples" activity based on the Standard Price with an amount of 100.
If we now take a look at the invoice items for his invoice, we see the following:
You can see on the left of the invoice item there are two items listed. The first line is the description of invoice item, and the second row is the specific price that relates to that item.
Let's see how we can work with the different prices...
You will see that on the left side, on the first line you have a text box where you can edit the description, and on the second line you have a drop down menu where you can select the price:
You will see that for the moment, the description and amount fields still show the details of the old price:
The description and invoice amount fields are now updated, and the payment and payment schedule information has been updated too.
It is also possible to edit an Invoice Item's details to be different to the price it relates to.
You will notice if you do this that you now have the message "The price amount and invoice item amount are different." While this isn't directly a problem, we put this message there to alert you to this fact, in case you have made the change by accident. The recommended way of working is to keep the invoice item amount the same as the associated price amount, and create any more specific changes (such as adding a discount) by adding an additional invoice item.
It is possible to add an invoice item with a negative price, which is great for when you find you need to give your client a discount. We recommend you give a discount this way, rather than reducing the amount of the original invoice item, for the following reasons:
You will have specific documentation on the invoice that the discount was given.
The original invoice item's amount will still match the amount of the Price item it relates to.
Here are the steps:
The invoice amount will now be updated to the new value and the payment and payment schedule details will be updated too.
It would be easy to think you could cancel a booking by making the total of the invoice items on that booking equal zero. However this does not perform a cancellation as far as the app is concerned - it just gives a free place to the client instead.
In order to perform a booking cancellation, you need to follow one of these steps:
If you need to cancel a complete booking (so for each attendee who is a part of that booking), then you should:
It may be that you have a booking for two or more people, and you need to cancel some but not all of them from the booking.
You should be aware that on a booking, the first person who books is the "lead" attendee, and is considered responsible for the payment of the booking. (In the discussion below, we will call all other attendees on the booking "additional attendees".) In order to maintain consistency about who has made a payment for what, it is not possible in the app to change the lead attendee.
Hence we end up with two circumstances here:
In this case we can remove the cancelling attendee(s) from the invoice:
To partially cancel a booking which removes the lead attendee but keeps the additional attendee(s)
In this case we need to:
There could become an issue here if the activity is already full, in that you could cancel the entire booking and then another person not associated with this booking takes the place. At the moment, in order to reduce the chance of this happening, you are best to work with the secondary attendee(s) to have them make the booking just a few minutes after you have cancelled the existing one. In the future, we will have an option to allow a specific booking to be made which overrides the waiting list feature so they can book first, and then you can remove the existing booking.
When you change invoice items, it has a knock-on effect on the Payments that are associated with the invoice. Here are how this works:
Invoice is completely unpaid Nothing changes
Invoice was paid, new invoice amount is more Nothing changes.
Invoice was paid, new invoice amount is more, client has a payment with an outstanding amount In this case the outstanding amount WILL NOT be allocated to the updated invoice. You will need to visit the payment separately to perform the allocation.
Invoice was paid, new invoice amount is less than amount paid Allocations are re-organised to reflect this. Your client will now have one or more Payments which contain a credit, and you will need to decide what to do with that credit - see lesson MF-5 for more details about managing this!
As we discussed above, if a lead attendee cancels, then you need to cancel the whole booking and ask the additional attendees to book again.
In this case, any payments made will have come from the lead attendee, and will need to be refunded or kept as a credit as described in lesson MF-5.
If you wish to issue a refund for the cancellation of the additional attendee, this can be returned to the lead attendee's card or bank account as discussed in lesson MF-5.
It becomes more challenging to retain a credit for the cancelled additional attendee, as the payment made, which now contains a credit, will be in the name of the lead attendee.
The way around this is to effectively create a gift voucher for the cancelled additional attendee through the use of a Discount Code. This "gift voucher" will be paid for by creating an invoice to the lead attendee for the credit amount.
The steps are as follows:
Create an invoice to the lead attendee:
Fill in the fields as:
Now allocate the credit amount on the lead attendee's payment to this new invoice:
The payment will now no longer contain a credit, and the gift voucher invoice will be fully paid.
Now create the Discount Code:
Finally, send the discount code to the secondary attendee!
Note that if you wished to retain an admin fee for performing this operation, you can make the discount code be for less than the credit amount.
Changing invoice items changes Scheduled Payments too. The app will work out a new payment schedule based on the new invoiced amounts, but it may not necessarily be the payment schedule you now want for your client. Hence we recommend taking a look at the new schedule and making any changes that your specific situation requires.
Here are the scenarios you will encounter:
The increased amount is divided by the number of outstanding scheduled payments and added to the amount due for each one. So for example, if you have two outstanding scheduled payments of 200 each and you add 40 to the value of the invoice, then each scheduled payment will be increased to 220.
A new scheduled payment is created for the increased amount with a payment date in 3 days time. No Payment Reminder email is automatically sent out for this, as we recognise that you may want to change the payment date. So the steps to follow here are:
This works in a similar way to scenario (1) above. The decreased amount is divided by the number of outstanding scheduled payments and subtracted from the amount due for each one. So for example, if you have two outstanding scheduled payments of 200 each and you deduct 40 to the value of the invoice, then each scheduled payment will be decreased to 180.
In this case the latest dated scheduled payment(s) have their amounts due reduced to reflect the new situation.
There you have it... pretty well everything you could want to know about changing invoice items, which is a very deep topic!
We've gone through the mechanisms to change them, how best to work with changes like giving a discount, and how to understand and manage what happens to Payments and Scheduled Payments along the way.
In the next lesson, we look at how to move a booking to be for a different activity...
