Multiple recurring invoices

Creating a new recurring invoice

Creating a new recurring template with multiple recurring invoices starts off the same as with virtually any process in the marinacloud application - in the top left corner, click Action and select 'Create new recurring template'. Doing so will open up the following form (upper half):

The upper half of this form is the standard form for entering customer data.

The only added element worth mentioning is the description box. Here you can enter a general description for the recurring invoice that will later appear on your list of invoices. Adding a description might make a recurring invoice easier to track down and identify.

However, it is the bottom half that holds the core features of the recurring invoices feature.

Multiple recurring invoices vs. One single invoice with payment plan: This is the part where our two paths diverge. In this example, we will choose the option of multiple recurring invoices.

You will immediately notice that choosing this option will activate the Conversion box on the right side of the form. The significance and role of this box is explained below.

In short, when we create a recurring template with multiple recurring invoices, we will NOT charge our customer immediately. Instead, as the due date of each individual recurring payment passes, the customer will be charged with the amount of that individual installment by converting the individual payment plan document into an invoice.

This conversion can be done manually or automatically, as explained below.

Start date: This box indicates the date when the recurring invoice plan is initiated

First invoice: This box indicates when the first invoice will be issued

Schema: Two options - Quarterly (send one invoice every three months) and Monthly (send one invoice every month)

Payment term: Enter the period in which the customer is expected to pay the invoice

Surcharge: When charging a customer for a contractual service, since your customer is paying for a service in installments, you can add a surcharge to their payment. Enter the percentual value of the surcharge here. This feature has not been released yet.

Conversion: As mentioned above, the Conversion box is only available for the Multiple recurring invoices option. There are two options: automatic and manual.

If we set conversion to automatic, the payment document will be automatically converted into an invoice on the start date for each individual installment, and then sent to the customer by e-mail.

On the other hand, if we set conversion to manual, we will have to monitor the status of our payment documents in the Recurring module (see image below) and convert the payment documents manually when they reach the overdue status.

Once we have selected all of the traits of our new recurring invoices, we click Generate plan and the plan is generated below.

We can double-check if everything is alright and then move to the next trainstop:

This is where we add our service and potentially some other data, such as discounts and the like, same as with a regular invoice.

Once we've taken care of that, we move to the following trainstop:

This is where our recurring invoice documents are first generated and we can check whether everything is alright.

Notice that, above the PDF previews, we have several tabs (in this example, Water yearly, Water yearly 1/4 etc.). These are all of our documents and we can check all of them. The first document is the template, and the remaining documents are payment documents that will be used to generate invoices. These two types of documents are described in more detail below.

 Documents and templates

Creating a recurring invoice will generate two types of files: several documents and a single template. In the Recurring invoices module, you can filter these two documents by type simply by clicking Documents and Templates in the upper right corner.

Let's take a look what these files represent.

Template

A template is the document that holds the entire payment plan, specifying the total amount, each individual recurring invoice to be issued (and their most important data) and so on.

Documents

Documents are the files that will get converted into regular invoices once their due date comes. They can have one of several statuses, and it is possible for you to filter them according to these statuses (upper right corner). The statuses are:

• Automatic: as stated previously, a document with the status Automatic will be automatically converted to a regular invoice upon its issue date.
• Converted: a document with this status has already been converted to a regular invoice.
• Cancelled: a document with this status has been cancelled for whatever reason.
• Overdue: manual documents that were supposed to be converted to invoices on a past date, but were not, are assigned the Overdue status
• Manual: as stated previously, a document with the status Manual will have to be manually converted to a regular invoice upon its issue date