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(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.
There are two locations where such an invoice can be created
- Go to Contacts and select a specific contact.
- Click on [ + Create Invoice]
- Go to Finances - Invoices & Payments
- Click on [ + Add New Invoice] on the left side
Starting from either location will bring up the Create Invoice window...
Fill in the fields as follows:
- Invoice to: start typing the name of the contact, and then select the contact from the list you are presented with. If the client does not exist in the contact database, then you need to create their contact record first before creating the invoice.
- Invoice Description - enter what the invoice is for in a form you would wish to see it on an invoice you send to your client.
- Activity - this field is optional and probably will not be used in the majority of cases. It should only be used if the invoice relates directly to an activity you are running. If extra item you are charging a client for relates to an existing booking, you will be better to add that as an extra invoice item to the existing booking, as described in lesson MF-7.
- Amount Invoiced - enter the amount being invoiced. Also select the currency if it is not in your normal accounting currency.
- Click on [Create Invoice]
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.
- If necessary, go to the Payment Schedule tab and change the schedule to match what you have agreed with your client.
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.
- Click on the Send Messages option on the invoice's local menu.
- Click on [Send Payment Reminder Email]
The Payment Reminder email will be sent.
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:
- Go to the Activities - Default Messages area
- Select the Payment Reminder message.
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:
- Go to Settings - Business Settings
- Delete the text for the payment methods you don't wish to appear. So in this example we have removed the text for Paypal, Cash and Cheque:
Which will leave us with a message just containing the card payment and bank transfer payment methods:
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:
- Go to the Finances - Invoices and Payments area
Method 1 - add payment to invoice
- Find the invoice on the left side of the screen, and click on the [+] button:
Method 2 - add a payment and allocate it to the invoice
- Select [+ Add New Payment] from the right side of the screen
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.
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.