Billing and Payments workflow
Follow these steps to implement a basic billing workflow:
- Perform the billing run. Schedule your billing run to complete early in the morning, allowing yourself time to spot-check your invoices. If applicable, confirm that usage was loaded and charges were applied as you expected. See Creating Bill Runs for more information.
- Post the bill run. Post the bill run (which will post all invoices contained in the bill run) after you check your invoices to confirm that they are correct.
Once you have posted your invoices and sent them to the customer, changes to an invoice can only be made via an adjustment. Therefore, we recommend you check your invoices and make any necessary changes before posting and sending your invoice.
- Mail or email your invoices. Download the invoice PDFs to batch print and mail out, or batch email your invoices from the bill run. Alternatively, you can choose to perform this step after performing a payment run. See Invoice Delivery for more information.
- Perform the payment run. Execute either an ad hoc or scheduled payment run in the late morning or at a minimum several hours after your bill run completes. This will ensure that you have time to review invoices and subsequently post so that you can collect your electronic auto-pay payments. See Creating Payment Runs for more information.
Users executing the payment run should follow up on failed payments and retry payments as needed. When this process is complete, you can proceed to mail or email the invoices.
Auto-post and auto-email
When you are very comfortable with the best practice billing workflow process (we recommend approximately 6+ months of billing) and/or have very simple pricing, try the following to further automate your billing process:
- Enable the Support bill run auto-post billing rule.
- Auto-post invoices upon completion of the bill run
- Email invoices after auto-post is complete
Workflow with auto-post and auto-email
Your workflow will be different if you have enabled the auto-post and auto-email invoice options:
- Billing Run with Auto-Post and Auto-Email Selected
- Schedule your billing run with the auto-post and auto-email selected.
- Once the bill run completes, it will automatically be posted (all invoices contained in the bill run will also be posted), and invoices will be emailed to customers who have been set up to receive invoices via email. This means there is no confirmation step (spot-checking of invoices) before posting the bill run or emailing invoices.
- Payment Run
Schedule your payment run to execute after your billing run completes and posts. Depending on how many customers you are processing in your bill run, you should plan accordingly to ensure your bill run has a sufficient amount of time to complete and be posted before the payment run executing. The payment run can only collect payment for posted invoices.
Users executing the payment run should follow up on failed payments and retry payments as needed. When this process is complete, you can mail or email the invoices.