Monthly Billing changes
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The monthly billing has been redesigned to work properly with the reservation's auto-charged-thru date and auto-rates, instead of depending on the paid-through date. This solves some problems with reservations leaving mid-month, or paying in advance, or late on payments, etc. Hopefully this will also make it easier to understand and give more accurate results. However there might be some initial problems requiring you to tweak your rates setup and reservation charged-thru dates to get things to work properly.

The biggest change is that it now uses the full auto-rates functionality, instead of blindly adding one "month" charge to each reservation. While this guarantees better results overall and allows for more flexibility, you may have to make some changes to your Rates setup initially.

·The "Use for monthly billing" flag in the Rates definitions no longer exists. To specify which rates should be used for monthly billing, use the "Resv Types" selections -- include the "Monthly" reservation type in any rates that should apply, and remove it from any that shouldn't. You can also exclude rates from the monthly billing calculations by checking the "Exclude from auto-rates" option (which will exclude them from other auto-calculations as well, e.g. when adding charges when checking in.)  

·Since the full auto-rates algorithm is used for monthly billing, your Rates setup needs to follow the guidelines for auto-rates (see the Help file for details). In particular, you need to make sure that all of your monthly rates appear above the shorter-period rates in the Rates list, so they are applied first.  

·Depending on the options you've set up for monthly billing, it may need to add charges for a partial month (e.g. if the reservation ends before the end of the billing month). You'll need to have rates that can be applied to this, for instance a pro-rated daily rate if that's the way you handle it.  


You'll also notice that the dialog now asks for the "Bill-To" date. This is an important distinction from the previous paid-through date setting. For instance, previously you would set the date to 3/31/04 if you're billing for April (to show any paid through March). Now you would set it to 4/30/04, since you want to bill them through April. (A new "End of next month" button has been added to make this easy.) Therefore any reservations that have not been charged for all of April will be included. You can also opt to show any not yet paid through a particular date, regardless of how far in advance they might have been charged. (This can also be handy to get a list of delinquent payments.)

The other big change has been the addition of several options to customize exactly how and what you bill the customers. These options, which you probably only need to set up once, have been moved to a sub-dialog (Billing and Printing Options), to get them out of the way.

Here's a brief description of the new options (not necessarily in the order they appear on the dialog):

You can now choose to exclude reservations leaving before the bill-to date. While the new auto-rates method can handle the actual charges better now, there may be other reasons that you don't want to bill them at all this time (for instance if their actual departure date is uncertain and you prefer to charge them when they leave).

There is a new option to use the reservation's paid-through date if the charged-through date has not been set. While this is not generally recommended, you may need to set this the first time through to cover "old-method" reservations that might not have a charged-through date yet. (A better method would be to review all of your monthly reservations and manually set their correct charged-through date in Reservation Details).

There is a new option to include Owner reservations in monthly billing. This was an oversight previously, since many parks need to charge owners a monthly storage fee, for instance.

Finally, there is a group of 4 options that determine what to charge each reservation depending on its last charged-through date, the bill-to date, and its Last Night (departure date). Note that if all 4 of these are NOT checked, then the billing will essentially be the same as it was before -- 1 month's charges will be added to each reservation to be billed, starting from the current charged-through date. Here are the new billing options:

·Charge to at least bill-to -- With this option set, it will add charges all the way from the last charged-through to the bill-to-date, no matter how many months (or partial months) that would be. This is great for "catching up" on missed billings, but may bill for more than you expect if a reservation's charged-through date isn't accurate. Note that the reason it's "at least to..." is to allow for the next option.  

·Charge only in full months -- This option can be used if you don't want any partial-month billing to occur. For instance if your bill-to is 4/30 but the reservation has already been charged through 4/15, it will still add 1 month (and adjust the charged-through to 5/15 after billing). This is a good choice if you don't try to keep your billing in sync with the 1st of the month and just charge months from their first night. Note that this can be overridden by the next option.  

·Limit charges to the end of the reservation -- This will prevent charging a full month if their Last Night occurs before the bill-to-date -- it will attempt to use weekly or daily rates as appropriate to bill their remaining time. More precisely, it charges from their current charged-through to their last night, charging a partial month if needed. So if the previous option was also checked along with this one, the example given above would still result in a partial-month bill if their last night was 5/10, for instance.  

·Don't add any charges if already charged for part of the month -- With this option selected, then instead of billing for a partial month or charging beyond the bill-to date, it simply wouldn't add any charges at all if it can't add a full month. This effectively overrides the last 2 options, since it can't add charges past the bill-to and it can't add partial month charges.  


An important note -- since some of these new options can result in some reservations having no new charges added, you should check the list to see if any have $0 for the New Charges. You may not want to print invoices for those. To skip them easily, sort by New Charges and then highlight only those with non-zero charges before pre-printing invoices.

Another important note -- since this is now based on charged-through instead of paid-through, the New Charges for most or all of the reservations will change to $0 after you click Add Charges (because the charged-through is instantly updated, and now they are charged in full). If you don't have the "Also include any paid-through..." option selected, with the same date as the bill-to date, all of those just charged will be removed fro the list before you get a chance to print them. So, you either want to use the Pre-Print function first, before adding the charges, or you need to select the option to include any not paid-through the bill-to date.