(MF-9) Managing Invoices for Non-Attendance Items

Most of the invoices that you have stored in Workshop Angel will have been created automatically when one of your clients books onto an activity. However you will have other circumstances where you want to manually create an invoice for something other than this, for example for the sale of a physical item, or a more appointment based activity you carry out.

This lesson takes you through the complete process of managing Non Attendance Invoices.

Creating a Non Attendance Invoice

There are two locations where such an invoice can be created

Starting from either location will bring up the Create Invoice window...

Fill in the fields as follows:

The invoice will then be created and you will see the status and summary information:

So we now have an invoice created, with the full amount outstanding, and one scheduled payment, with a default due date of three days later than today.

Sending The Payment Reminder Email

Now you have created the invoice, you need to send your client the Payment Reminder email so they have the payment details, and a link to be able to make their payment by card.

The Payment Reminder email will be sent.

Payment Reminder Message Details

As you will probably be familiar, the text of a Payment Reminder message is set on an activity by activity basis. However, in this situation we don't have an associated activity, so how is the content of the Payment Reminder email created?

The message text is taken from what we refer to as the Default Messages area, which is discussed in detail in Chapter 5 of this documentation. The is the text of each message that is copied to a specific activity when a new activity is created.

To content of this text:

You are able to edit this text as described in chapter 5. The default text which is supplied when you create your account reads like this:

The one area of this you need to pay attention to is what is listed for the [Payment Methods]. When you are sending this message for an activity, the payment methods that will be listed in the message are those you have selected to accept for that specific activity. However here, we do not have a specific activity. Hence you may find that all five possible payment methods are listed like this:

If you wish to prevent any of these methods from appearing, then you need to remove the text for their payment from the Settings area:

Which will leave us with a message just containing the card payment and bank transfer payment methods:

Recording a Payment

If a payment is made to a non-attendance invoice by card, then the payment will be recorded and reconciled to the invoice automatically for you.

If you need to record a payment made by a non-card method, you can do this in one of two ways:

Method 1 - add payment to invoice

Method 2 - add a payment and allocate it to the invoice

Tracking Payment Status of Non-Attendance Invoices

At the moment, there is no simple way to track the payment status of non-attendance invoices. You will need to search for the invoices manually and check whether they have been paid.

In future releases we intend to add more features to help with this.

Summary

We have looked at how it is possible to create invoices which are independent of attendance at an activity. Once the invoice has been created, it is possible to create a payment schedule and send the Payment Reminder message so the payment can be made by card or other methods.

In the next lesson we will look at working with external accounting software alongside Workshop Angel.

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