Account Invoice Period
Contents
Overview
At the time when they are created, all accounts are defined to have an Account Invoice Period. An account invoice period is the overarching time period for the billing of the account. Account periods are calculated from the following two fields that are completed.
Account Billing Day
This is the customer’s billing day. The customer’s initial invoice will be pro-rated to this day. Valid entries are numbers 1-28 representing the day of the month when the account invoice period will commence from.
Period Length
This is in months. Most customers will receive monthly invoices, therefore this value is usually set to 1. However if your customers receive invoices every 3 months, this should be set to 3.
Using the default settings of Account Billing Day = 1, and Period Length = 1, this means the customer's Account Invoice Period will run on a monthly cycle commencing on the 1st of each month and end on the last day of each month.
Please note: Invoices are generated 2 days after the end of the account invoice period. If the invoice period length is modified, any future account invoice periods that are created in advance and unprocessed will be removed.
Presuming the anniversary is the 1st of the month, Emersion’s invoice procedure follows the structure below:
- 12:01am DAY 1 – Advance access fees are generated as pending cardlines
- 12:01am DAY 2 – Usage Periods are closed for the period prior. This allows time for late landing usage, or usage files delivered the day AFTER the end of period to arrive
- 12:01am DAY 3 – Invoices are created based on all pending cardlines.
Manual Invoice Creation
From time to time, it may be necessary to create a manual invoice. Perhaps you need to bill a customer for a product and you need to issue them an invoice immediately (rather than wait until the usual month to month invoice generation process to complete as described above).
There is nothing wrong with creating an "off-cycle" invoice, however you WILL be shortening the underlying "account invoice period" and therefore the Invoice Period that is displayed on a standard Emersion invoice.
Whilst it is possible to modify the issue and due dates of an invoice when you approve it, it is not possible to modify the display of or the underlying account invoice period.
Using the above example whereby a customer is on a standard month to month billing cycle and it is currently midway through the month - let's say the 16th. In this example, a previous manual invoice was raised on the 10th. This has shortened the account invoice period TWICE within the same month and so will be reflected as such on each invoice.
In this example screenshot;
- The top invoice was created on the 16th Feb and so displays the invoice period as the 10th Feb - 16th Feb.
- The bottom invoice was created on the 10th and so displays the invoice period as the 1st Feb - 10th Feb.
- If no further invoices are manually created, the next invoice due to be created will be on the 3rd March (with an invoice period of 16th Feb - 1st March) and so on.
