Summary Invoicing Explained

Overview

Do you have customers for whom you generate multiple invoices every month? Customers who may have several jobs running at the same time, or who would like to issue one purchase order a month to you and be invoiced just once referencing that purchase order? If so, you may want to use the summary invoicing (consolidated billing) functionality, and set those customers up to receive only one or two invoices a month that summarize their monthly billing activity.

Scenario

You have a customer with three active job sites and a total of seven open rental contracts among those jobs. All rental contracts are on a 28-day cycle, but since the jobs and rental contracts did not all become active at the same time, you find that you are generating multiple invoices for the customer during the month.

The customer has asked you to consolidate their billing and send them one invoice a month for all active jobs and open rental contracts.

Setup

Summary invoicing is accomplished by applying a Billing Code to the customer’s master record. This billing code dictates how often the customer will receive a summary invoice and how the invoice will be generated. These codes are found under type BI in the Default Codes program on the Cross Application Menu. The following codes are used:

A – Summary Invoice by Customer – 15th and 31st
B – Summary Invoice by Job – 15th and 31st
C – Summary Invoice by Customer
J – Summary Invoice by Job
P - Summary Invoice by Project

To apply one of these codes to a customer’s master record, go to the Customer Master Maintenance program and do the following:

Access the customer’s master record.
On the main screen, press F9 to access the Billing Information popup window.
In the Billing Code field, enter the appropriate code based on how the customer wants to receive their summary invoice.

In our scenario above, the appropriate code would be C because the customer wants to receive one invoice a month for all jobs and contracts.
Save the changes to the customer’s record.

Processing

When a customer is set up for summary invoicing, only one or two invoices print for that customer each month, depending on the billing code assigned to the customer. Codes A and B cause two invoices to print, and only one invoice prints for codes C, J and P.

The regular cycle billing for the customer is still processed in the background, so each individual invoice (on the 28-day cycle in our scenario) for each rental contract is generated, and the accounts receivable transaction is processed, but invoice printing is suppressed. This means that the individual invoice records exist, but they are not automatically printed as they would have been if the customer was not set up for summary invoicing. Instead, those individual invoices are summarized on one or two invoices for the month with the appropriate references printed on the summary invoice. When a summary invoice is generated, a unique document number is assigned, and the customer can remit payment against that number.

Because the individual cycle billing invoice records exist, they can be manually printed individually, if necessary. This makes it important for accounts receivable personnel to know which customers are set up for summary invoicing. If they are not aware that some individual invoices will be suppressed from printing, they might mistakenly think that a customer’s invoices didn’t print (in the daily printing) and go manually print the invoices and send them, resulting in the customer being billed twice when they eventually receive their summary invoice.

Reporting and Inquiries

Once the first summary invoice for a customer has been generated, you can search customer transactions by this summary in Customer Contract Inquiry.

You can also use Customer Invoice Inquiry to access and review summary invoices.

The following reports may also include summary invoice information:

Aged Receivables
Earned Not Billed
A/R Open Invoices

Special Notes

When a customer who is set up for summary invoicing returns all equipment for a job, and the job is complete, you must deactivate the job so that the NIGHTLY program will generate the final invoice for it.

When a customer who is set up for summary invoicing returns equipment for a contract, and you use Full Return or Partial Return to process the transaction, a document does not print. You must access the transaction in Customer Transactions and select Option 6 to reprint.