Billing Monthly Service Charges or Administrative Fees

The default for HW Invoicing is to invoice each individual charge (home watch, concierge, reimbursable, etc) separately.  However, there may be a need to invoice a client a monthly fee in addition to any individual charges.

Please note that if you do "subscription billing" -- basically a monthly fee that includes a set number of hours, visits, etc. -- you should consider using HWIT's Estate Management Billing option.

The simplest way to do monthly charges is with a recurring Work Order (Series).  You should assign a Series with the monthly fees, and date each Occurrence based on how you wish to invoice.

First, set up the recurring Series as in this screenshot:

The two items to consider on the Series setup are the Assigned To user and the billing detail.   For the Assigned To user, you can leave that assigned to yourself, however, each month you will see many Work Orders appear on your calendar and route list for each of the billings.  So, you can consider assigning them to a "Billing User" -- each account has a Home Watch IT account listed and you can assign these Series to that user, so that it does not appear on your individual Route List.

In the billing detail, select your service code for monthly billings and enter in the amount you wish to charge for the month of home visits.

At this point click on Save & Add Occurrences.

Before adding Occurrences, you should consider when you want to bill them.  Do you want to bill for the month ahead or for the month just completed?   This will determine the best way to date the Occurrences.

For example, if you typically cut off your billings on the last date of the month (e.g. August 31), you may want your Occurrences to all be dated the last day of the month so that they appear when your September Invoice is created.  Even though the Occurrence is dated August 31, it is for September visits.

If you were to date the Occurrences on the 1st of the month, and use a cutoff date of the 31st, the Occurrences dated the 1st will not be included in the invoice.  This could be helpful if billing in arrears at the end of each month.

However you date the Occurrences is up to you, just remember that when you select your cutoff date that will determine whether or not they are included in that month's billing.

Let's use the last day of the month as an example:

If you select the last day of the month, and click the Create on the same date each  month checkbox, the system will automatically create the Work Orders the last day of each month.

Now just invoice as usual and the charges will be added to each customer's invoice each period.

Note that if you wish to do Quarterly or Annual fees, you use the same setup as above but just adjust the Frequency accordingly.