Rental Proration Settings Overview

If you manage inventory, rentals, and rental jobs in ServiceCore, two settings control how rental proration works on your recurring invoices:

• Automated Rental Rate Proration for Recurring Invoices and Batch Billing
• Early Pick-Up Proration

These settings decide whether ServiceCore automatically adds mid-cycle rental activity, like extra units, one-time services, or early pickups, to your invoices, so you don't have to track it down and bill for it by hand.

Before You Start

Here are a few things to know before you continue:

• To see if you have access to this feature in ServiceCore, please check out this article on user permission levels.
• These settings mainly apply to rental invoices created from a recurring invoice template, with some effect on one-time rental billing as well. 
• These settings only apply to invoices tied to a rental. Invoices not tied to a rental aren't affected. 
• Changes take effect going forward only. Invoices already created won't be adjusted, only invoices created after you change a setting will use the new rule. 
• ServiceCore also has a setting for automatically generating prorated credit memos when inventory from an advance-billed rental is returned early. That's a separate setting covered in Automated Credit Memos Overview and FAQs.

See the Revenue Impact

This fictional rental scenario shows how these settings can raise or lower your invoice totals when you use recurring invoices.

Scenario

Below is an example timeline of activities for a rental spanning June 1 to July 31:

How Proration Settings Affect Revenue

Given the scenario above, here are three examples of how changing proration settings affects the revenue of this rental:

Try It Out For Yourself

Here is the spreadsheet we've developed to simulate how these settings can impact rental revenue. It’s a Google sheet with instructions and you can make a copy and use it as you please: Advanced Proration and Early Pick-Up Examples Google Sheet.

Automated Rental Rate Proration for Recurring Invoices and Batch Billing

When you bill rentals in advance or in arrears using recurring invoices, extra service jobs, one-time charges, and mid-billing cycle deliveries or pick-ups are easy to miss if you're creating one-time invoices manually.

This setting collects any mid-billing cycle rental activity and adds it to invoices created from recurring templates automatically, whether you create the invoice manually from the template or use batch billing.

Turn On Automated Rental Rate Proration

When you're ready to turn on this feature, it's as simple as changing one setting in your account. To turn on this feature, follow these steps:

1. Click your name in the top-right corner.
2. Select "Settings".
3. Click into "Preferences" under the Company section.
4. Scroll down to the "Proration" area. 
5. Click to expand the "Rentals" section.

6. For "Should rental rates prorate automatically for units and service jobs added mid-billing cycle?" select "Yes." 

   

    

7. Click "Save."

Rental Rate Line Items

Rental rate line items will be generated based on the rental rate period. This means that instead of one line item for the entire billing period, a separate line will be generated for each subdivision of the rental period.

The quantity is calculated by Units on Site x Number of Days in the Period. In the first row of the example above we have:

• 1 item on site for a fraction of the 28 day Rental Rate:
  • 21 Total Days on Site
• (21/28) = 0.75

The changed behavior can be seen with the weekly rental, where each week now has its own line item for the number of units on site during the week. If the billing period results in a partial week being billed, the line item quantity will be calculated in the same way as in the example above.

This change makes rental rate billing much more clear for you and your customers.

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 warning icon, you'll see this help text: 

  • "Flagged: 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.”

    

Service Line Items Added to Jobs

Service line items added to jobs when creating a new rental or when creating rental jobs will now be pulled into recurring rental invoices automatically, whether you create the invoice manually from the template or use batch billing. 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 Service Line Items on Rental Jobs

Use service line items 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

Automatically Add Past Activity to Invoices

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.

Please Note: Keep the link between a rental invoice and any jobs from that billing period intact. This link is what makes automated proration possible. If you don't want to charge for a job, remove that job's line items instead of removing the job itself.

In the example below you can see the delivery job and its 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 28 days
• If there is an extra delivery job on Jan 17 to delivery additional units to the job site
• When you create the invoice:
  • The rental rates will be prorated automatically, whether the invoice is created through batch billing or manually from the template, to include the 11 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 17 delivery job and the one-time delivery fee associated to the mid-cycle delivery job will be added one-time to the invoice (and it will drop off the Mar 1, Apr 1, and future invoices)

Below is an example of how this could appear on an invoice showing proration for the mid-billing additional delivery and the charge associated with that delivery.

Service Jobs

If there are extra service jobs performed for a rental during an already-billed cycle, and these service jobs have non-zero "billable" line items, these jobs will be automatically added to the next invoice, whether through batch billing or when you create it manually from the template, when this setting is set to "Yes".

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 28 days
• If there is an extra service job on Jan 18 to clean the units on-site
• When you create the the 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):

Pick-Up Jobs

Rental rates for inventory removed from a rental will be prorated based on the early pickup setting described in the next section, Early Pick-Up Proration, below.

Early Pick-Up Proration

This setting controls whether rental rates are prorated when units or services are picked up early, in the middle of a billing cycle.

The default is "Yes." With this setting on, ServiceCore automatically prorates rental rates based on the pick-up job's scheduled date.

Turn On or Off Early Pick-Up Proration

1. Click your name in the top-right corner.
2. Select "Settings".
3. Click into "Preferences" under the Company section.
4. Scroll down to the "Proration" area. 
5. Click to expand the "Rentals" section.

6. For "Should rental rates prorate automatically on pick-up jobs?"select "Yes" or "No."

   

7. Click "Save."

If This Setting Is Set to "Yes"

This is the default. ServiceCore automatically prorates the rental rate based on the pick-up job's scheduled date, so the invoice reflects only the time the picked-up units or services were on-site.

If This Setting Is Set to "No"

With this setting set to "No," rental rates are billed at the full rate and quantity for the billing period, even when a pick-up happens early. A one-time fee tied to the pick-up job is added as a separate line item instead.

In the screenshot below, the Services table shows an invoice for the billing period 1/29/2026 to 2/13/2026, where units were picked up early:

• Line 1: The "28 Day Rate" for the sink is billed at the full $100 rate for the entire period, with no reduction for the early pick-up.
• Line 2: The "4 Weeks Basic Rental" for the toilet units is billed at the full rate and quantity ($100 x 4) for the same period, also with no reduction.
• Line 3: A one-time fee tied to the pick-up job itself (here, "Early Rental Termination Fee") appears as a separate line item, distinct from the rental rate lines above.

Neither rental rate line shrinks to reflect the early pick-up. Instead, the pick-up is reflected only through the separate one-time fee.

Please Note: ServiceCore also has a setting for automatically generating prorated credit memos when inventory from an advance-billed rental is returned early. That's a separate setting covered in Automated Credit Memos Overview and FAQs.

If you have any questions, please reach out to our Support team through the chat widget on the bottom of this page or by sending an email to support@servicecore.com!