Here's your peek behind the curtain. This page describes upcoming features, tools, improvements and functionality that the ServiceCore team is currently discussing, sketching, designing, coding and testing.

Improvements to Automated Rental Rate Proration for Recurring Invoices and Batch Billing

When you bill rentals in advance or in arrears using recurring invoices, you never want to miss out on extra service jobs, one-time charges, or mid-billing cycle deliveries or pick-ups. Before now, in order to bill for these kinds of activities, you had to make one-time invoices manually. This caused you extra time and effort to create invoices for mid-billing cycle activities.

The improved rental rate proration and recurring invoice billing will now handle collecting together any mid-billing cycle activities on rentals, and automatically adding them to invoices created from recurring templates. This includes when you create the invoice from the recurring template manually and when you use batch billing.

Here is an overview of the advanced proration changes:

Batch Billing

If you use recurring invoices for rentals and you use batch billing, when you're on the “Preview and Send” Invoices page, you will now see a flag on invoices when the total for the next upcoming billing cycle is different than the previous billing cycle total. 

• This flag will appear for rental and non-rental recurring invoices
• The flag will look like this:
  
• When you hover over the orange warning icon, you'll see this help text: "The invoice total for this billing period does not match the invoice total of the previous billing period. This is likely caused by additional delivery, pick-up, exchange or service jobs.”
  

Services Added to Jobs

Services added to jobs when creating a new rental or when creating rental jobs will now be pulled into recurring rental invoices automatically. Here are a few things to keep in mind when you add services to rental jobs:

• Services added to jobs will appear on the mobile app
• The rate and price of each service will appear in the mobile app
• Services added to jobs will automatically be added as billable line items to any invoices linked to this job

Best Practices for Services on Rental Jobs

Use services on jobs to bill for one-time charges such as:

• Delivery fees
• Extra one-time service charges
• Early pick-up charges

How to Avoid Double Billing for Rental Jobs

If you have a service on a rental job for $100.00, and a rental rate for weekly cleaning also for $100.00, this will create two line items and result in a double charge of this service ($200.00 total) on invoices created using the new advanced proration feature.

To avoid double charging customers, if rental rates already include the price your customers pay to have inventory cleaned, serviced, or winterized on a recurring basis you may want to:

• Change the rate of each service on the job to $0.00
  • For example, in the case where you use services on jobs as a technician or driver checklist and not as a list of billable services
    • The service line items will appear on invoices, but those line items won't add anything to the invoice total
    • This technique can provide transparency to your customers about what services are performed each job (and to show more details about what's being included in the rental rate price)
• Remove services from jobs
• Adjust the rental rate amount on the rental to exclude the price of the services added to jobs

Don't Miss Out on Past Money!

When you use batch billing to create invoices, or when you create the next invoice from a recurring invoice manually, all jobs that were scheduled, completed or cancelled during the previous billing cycle, and the next upcoming billing cycle, will be automatically added to the invoice.

It is important to maintain the links between rental invoices and any jobs that occurred during the recurring invoice billing period. This association between jobs and invoices is what makes automated proration possible.

If you don't want to charge for a job, you can remove any line items associated with that job. Please leave the job itself associated with the invoice so proration works as expected.

In the example below you can see the delivery job and it's one-time delivery fee associated with that job have been added to the invoice:

Delivery Jobs

Rental rates for the inventory associated to the rental will be prorated for the additional time the additional units were on the job site. Plus, any additional service line items added to mid-billing cycle delivery jobs will be added as a one-time service line items to the invoice.

For example:

• If you already created an invoice on Jan 1 for the billing period Jan 1-28 from a recurring invoice billing in Advance every 1 month
• If there is an extra delivery job on Jan 15 to delivery additional units to the job site
• When you create the Feb 1 invoice...
  • The rental rates will be prorated automatically to include the 15 days those additional units were on site (so you don't have to remember to add these extra two weeks of rental rates yourself)
  • The Jan 15 delivery job and the one-time delivery fee associated to the mid-cycle delivery job will be added one-time to the Feb 1 invoice (and it will drop off the Mar 1, Apr 1, and future invoices)

In the screenshot below you can see how the line items will appear (invoice date is March 10, billing 28 days in Advance)...

1. This line shows the prorated amount from the 3/1 delivery through the invoice date
2. This line shows the advanced billing amount for all units on site from 3/10 to 4/6 (28 days)
3. This line shows the one-time delivery charge associated with the 3/1 delivery job

Pick-Up Jobs

Rental rates for inventory removed from a rental will not be prorated for early pick-up jobs. If you prorate for early pick-ups, you will need to manually create these invoices from the recurring invoice. We are currently in the research and planning phases of a feature to automatically prorate for early pickups. Any additional service line items added to mid-billing cycle pick-up jobs will be added as a one-time service line items to the invoice.

For example:

• If you already created an invoice on Jan 1 for the billing period Jan 1-28 from a recurring invoice billing in Advance every 1 month
• If there is an early pick-up of units on Jan 15 to remove units from the job site
• When you create the Feb 1 invoice...
  • The rental rates will not be adjusted or pro-rated to provide a credit back on the Feb 1 invoice (the invoice bills for the items on-site as of the invoice date)
  • The early Jan 15 pick-up job and the one-time fee associated to the mid-cycle pick-up job will be added one-time to the Feb 1 invoice (and it will drop off the Mar 1, Apr 1, and future invoices)

In the example below, the line items on the invoice details page show...

1. There were 8 units on-site at the time of the invoice (billing period is 3/10-4/6)
2. There was an early pickup job on 3/15 (and the rental rates did not get pro-rated or reduced due to this early remove of items from the site)

Service Jobs

If there are extra service jobs performed for a rental during an already-billed cycle, these jobs will be automatically added to the next invoice (including any lines items associated to these mid-cycle service jobs).

For example:

• If you already created an invoice on Jan 1 for the billing period Jan 1-28 from a recurring invoice billing in Advance every 1 month
• If there is an extra service job on Jan 15 to clean the units on-site
• When you create the Feb 1 invoice...
  • The Jan 15 service job and the extra cleaning fee associated to the mid-cycle service job will be added one-time to the Feb 1 invoice (and it will drop off the Mar 1, Apr 1, and future invoices)

In the example below, you can see the extra cleaning was automatically pulled in during batch billing, even when the cleaning happened in the previous billing cycle (and when it hadn't been invoiced yet):

Additional Resources

For additional information and further reading about the topics above, please check out these help articles:

1. About Proration
2. Create a Rental Invoice with Recurring Billing
3. Use Batch Billing for Recurring Invoices
4. Add Rental Rates
5. Assign a Service to an Inventory Product to Show as a Rental Rate Option

Release Announcements

If you want to be the first to know when the features and improvements above are live in your account, you can get release announcements delivered straight to your inbox every Thursday. Here's how:

1. Go to Release Announcements
2. Click Follow
   
   

Questions?

If you have any questions, concerns, feedback, or downright skepticism about any of the upcoming features or improvements mentioned above, please feel free to contact support@servicecore.com for more information.

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