As your invoicing jobs within Service Fusion, you may notice a carrot next to the Invoice button. When selected, you'll see the option for a standard invoice as well as an option to create a recurring invoice! Recurring invoices are "standalone" invoices that repeat over time as indicated during creation. This will allow for you to invoice your customers on a repeating schedule independent of a job and manual creation!
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Once the Recurring Invoice option is selected, a new window will open that will allow for you to create your repetition settings for this invoice. If you've ever utilized the Repeating Jobs function, then this may be somewhat familiar to you.
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Within this dialogue, you're able to select a different Bill To and Primary Service Location contact and address as you would on a normal invoice. You will be able to see the Payment Terms, select the Invoice Communication Template that will be utilized with this set of recurring invoices, and the PDF Template to be used for the attached PDF if you have Custom Documents!
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To ensure emails are successfully sent to customers when the recurring invoices are generated, the user will need to update the "Email Customer Invoice After It Is Created" setting in Outbound Email Settings to be "YES". Your customers will also need to have "Invoice" checked in their Email Preferences, on the customer account. As a reminder, Email Preferences can be updated via Batch Edit & Delete Customers.
Once those items are set as preferred, you'll need to set up the recurrence schedule.
- Starts: Here is where you will indicate to the system when the first instance of this schedule will be. This will be the date that the recurrence schedule will be based on.
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- Recurrence Schedule: This setting is where you'll indicate to the system how often the recurring invoice will be created. The first drop down will have the option to set it to repeat Daily, Weekly, Monthly, or Yearly. Each of these options, when selected, will have a different time frame setting that can be utilized.
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- Daily- When selected, you'll select how often this invoice will be created in days. For example, you'll select that you'd like the invoice to be created every three days.
- Weekly- When selected, you'll be able to choose the day(s) of the week you'd like the invoice to be created on as well as how often this invoice will be created in a weekly format. For example, the invoice is set to repeat on Thursdays every two weeks.
- Monthly- When selected, you'll be able to choose the date that the invoice was created on, the third Thursday of the month, or the last day of the month as well as determine how often the invoice will be created in a monthly format. For example, the example above shows the invoice date to be 10/15/2020 so we could set the recurrence to repeat on the 15th of the month every three months.
- Yearly- When selected, you'll be able to choose when you'd like this invoice to repeat in a yearly format. For example, you'll set the invoice to repeat once every year from the start date of this invoice.
- Ends: This setting indicates to the system when the recurrence of this invoice should end. You can set it to be indefinite by choosing the "Never" option, you can choose a specific date by selecting the "Date" option, or you can choose for the recurrence to end after a specific number of occurrences by selecting "After".
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- Create On The: This last setting will tell the system when it should create these invoices for you to see within your Service Fusion system. You can choose to view it On The Day It Occurs to see it in your system when it sends out to your customer, 1st Day Of The Week which will indicate to the system to create the invoice internally on the Sunday of the week the invoice is scheduled to send to the customer, and 1st Day of the Month which will create the invoice internally on the 1st of the month that the invoice is scheduled to be sent to the customer.
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Once your repetition settings are set to your preferences, you'll click the save button at the bottom of the Recurring Invoice dialogue box. Once back at the job screen, your recurring invoice will appear towards the bottom of the View Job page above the Products & Services table!
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To further assist with the tracking of your recurring invoices, there is a section under the Accounting tab specifically for recurring invoices!
This recurring invoices section can also be accessed from any of the invoice dashboards as an added tab here as well.
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For FusionPay Customers Only
If you are currently utilizing FusionPay then you'll also see an option for Automatic Payment when creating a recurring invoice.
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With this addition, you'll be able to not only set up a recurring invoice in the system but also automatically charge your customers for their invoices. This function will utilize the credit card information saved to the Customer Account under the Financial Data tab. If the customer has multiple cards and would like the automatic payments to come from a specific card, you can change the card applied by selecting the Edit option.
Then selecting the card on file you'd like to use for these invoices, or add a whole new card!
If this functionality is utilized, the Recurring Invoice information will show a column with Auto Bill set to Yes.
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