There are three areas of consideration for monthly billing control. In each area the number of days used for monthly billing are defined as follows:
•Billing Cycle - The number of days that represents your “monthly” rate. A fair estimate is 95 percent of FocalPoint users use “28” for this number.
•“Bill Days 1” or “Monthly Billing Days for First Bill” - The number of days that should elapse before the first monthly bill is created. If left at 0, the Billing Cycle number is used. If, for example, your rental items will be billed for a month after 19 days have elapsed, you could set this field to 19 to get the invoice to the customer faster, and hopefully get paid faster.
•“Bill Days 2” or “Monthly Billing Days for Succeeding Bills” - The number of days that should elapse before the 2nd (3rd, 4th, 5th, etc.) monthly bill is created. If left at 0, the Billing Cycle number is used.
Area 1 – the Store Control File, C-4 from the main menu, Setup 4 tab. Whatever numbers are in these fields will be used as defaults when setting up new customers.
Area 2 – The Customer File (6-2 from the main menu), Additional Info tab. You can control billing cycle numbers by customer. Each customer must have the billing cycle fields filled in appropriately.
Area 3 – The Additional Header fields of an order. Whatever is in the customer record will default to here. This is where the rubber hits the road. When FocalPoint monthly bills, it looks ONLY to these fields on the order. What is set up in the store control file and customer file only serves as defaults to what are in these fields in the order. The cool thing is that you can change these fields in the order, “on the fly”. So if normally your billing cycle fields are 28-0-0, but you want this one order to be 29-19-19, you can do this
There are two ways to monthly bill, manually (A-4) and via an automatic nightly billing process (D-8 from the main menu). Please understand that the automatic method will NOT bill retroactively. It will simply tick through all the orders every night, look at the “Billing Cycle” fields on each order, do some quick math, and bill or not bill. If your server takes a night off, FocalPoint will not look back to find missed orders. You should periodically (once per week?) check the manual monthly billing screen (A-4 from the main menu) to make sure nothing is getting missed (Hint: if you turn your server off, or if you server gets automatically updated from Windows overnight, it could clobber your auto monthly billing).
A note about automatically billing orders for cash customers - If there are no payments on an order, and you allow cash customers to charge, you may control whether or not an order will monthly bill. Set the flag “Auto Bill Orders for Cash Customer” appropriately in the store manager file (C-4 from the main menu, Setup 3 tab).
To manually monthly bill an order, go to A-4 from the main menu and double click on the order(s) that you wish to monthly bill. If you would like to review/edit/take payments on the order before you monthly bill the order, use the "Edit Order" button in the lower right hand corner of the screen to edit the order.
A few other considerations about manual monthly billing are as follows. When you double click on an order due for monthly billing, several scenarios could occur:
If you DO NOT allow cash customers to charge (See store manager file, C-4 from the main menu, Hours Tab, “Allow Customers Assigned as Type CASH to Charge?”)
•If the monthly bill amount > than what has been paid then you can go no further without taking additional payments.
•You may edit the open order from this screen and apply payments directly to the order.
•Once the order has been paid in full you may then double click on the order from the manual monthly billing screen and monthly bill the order.
If you allow cash customers to charge (See store manager file, C-4 from the main menu, Hours Tab, “Allow Customers Assigned as Type CASH to Charge?” OR if the order is for a charge customer (but the order has payments on it)
•If deposits exist, you will be notified as such. You may edit the open order from this screen and convert deposits into payments, save the order, and attempt to monthly bill the order again.
•If there are any payments on an order, you will get a message “Payments exist, do you want to proceed with billing”.
•If you choose to proceed, FocalPoint will monthly bill the order. Any unpaid balance of the order will force FocalPoint to create an A/R invoice. Essentially, you will be given the opportunity to get additional payments from your customer (if needed) prior to monthly billing the order, but you will not be forced to do so.
•If you choose not to proceed, you may the open order from this screen and apply additional payments directly to the order, then save the order, then attempt to monthly bill the order again.
Prebilling monthly orders
For times when you want to prebill monthly orders, you will set your billing fields as follows:
Billing Cycle - 28
Bill Days 1 - 17 (or whatever number of days would normally lapse before the customer would pay the monthly rate)
Bill Days 2 - 17 (or whatever number of days would normally lapse before the customer would pay the monthly rate)
FocalPoint will bill the order on day 17, even though it is on a 28 billing cycle. Here's an example of how this works:
•554490 is opened on 11/1
•Using the above settings the monthly bill would be able to be created on 11/18.
•554490 would be closed.
•554490-2 would be opened. The rent date on this order would remain 11/1, and there would be a message on the order that the "NEXT BILLING CYCLE STARTS ON 11/29"
oWhy? - An order has to remain open to indicate that the items are still on rent. However, if you close the order between now and 11/29, you have already billed them, so the order needs to close for $0.
•If you try to monthly bill this order between 11/18 and 11/29, you will not find it in the Manual Monthly Billing screen, A-4 from the main menu. We consider orders like these "in grace".
•When the monthly billing overnight process runs on 11/29, the dates on 554490-2 will change to 11/29 - 12/27 and the message "NEXT BILLING CYCLE STARTS ON 11/29" will be removed from the order.
•What if you do not use the monthly billing overnight process?
•Whenever you go to the Manual Monthly Billing process, A-4 from the main menu, FocalPoint will go through all open orders, and look for any orders "in grace", and if the next billing cycle has been passed, the dates on 554490-2 will change to 11/29 - 12/27 and the message "NEXT BILLING CYCLE STARTS ON 11/29" will be removed from the order.
