This update brings you further improvements to the finance areas within Business Pilot. These updates focus on Invoices, new Customer Payment Options and feature an Outstanding Invoice Report!
PLEASE NOTE THAT THE NEW INVOICE ADMIN ROLE MAY AFFECT CERTAIN USERS PERMISSIONS. YOU WILL NEED TO READ THIS BLOG AND ACTION THE ROLE FOR ANY RELEVANT USERS.
Business pilot is very proud of its financial areas and how these can be beneficial for all businesses. This is why we continue to introduce new features and improve the current ones, to make your daily business tasks easier and quicker.
Payment On Account Option
We have added a brand new ‘Payment On Account’ option within the invoice area. This means you can now add a payment to a customer contract prior to raising an invoice. The payment will show in the paid column and bring down the resulting balances and orders on hand.
This allows you to put a payment on to Business Pilot in lieu of an invoice should you wish, which can then be retrospectively added to a later invoice to settle it. This will work similar to the way in which a credit can be allocated within Business Pilot.
This may be useful for businesses working on Pro-Forma invoice types.
Please see our ‘How To’ video on using this function.
New Due Dates in Invoices including Placeholders and Balances
We have also introduced an option for Due Dates on Invoices for those businesses/customers who are working on payment terms. You can now set the due date of an invoice when raised within the individual invoice as well as set global terms within the ‘Admin – Company Settings’ or via the Contact record for a specific customer.
The original Balance and Aged Debt Reports will be unaffected and will continue to work from the raised date of the invoice.
We have also added Placeholders for these for Invoices and Templates so you will need to add those to your invoices & statements if you wish to use them.
To manage ‘Due Dates’ via the ‘Contact’ you can also set Payment terms for a particular customer as shown below. These payment types can be set within the customer’s contact details and will carry through to the invoices within a Contract.
The system will also issue a warning box when the invoice due date is different from the contact default due date.
If you have a default payment term for the majority of your invoices this can be set in the global system settings via the Admin-Manage-Company Settings area as shown below. (If you’re standard payment terms are 0 days then you do not need to change anything as this will be the standard default).
This will populate the default term to all invoices when raised. You can also supersede this on individual invoices or specific customers as stated above.
Admin Menu
Default Invoice Payment Term Type
Default Invoice Payment Term Days
Retention Line Option in Invoices
For commercial customers with Retention payment terms you will now be able to set this as an additional line within individual invoices. It will work like the CIS with a tick box and will create a minus line within the invoice.
New Outstanding Invoice Report
In addition to the Balance Outstanding Report & Aged Debt Report, we now have a new Invoice Outstanding Report so you can see exactly which invoices have not been paid.
This is also tied to the new ‘Due Date’ option and the report can either be run to the ‘Raised Date’ or the ‘Due Date’ subject to your preference.
‘Hide O/S Balance’ Toggle
This is a slight feature enhancement to the original ‘Hide on O/S Balance’ option within the Finance tab of the Contract. Previously this would only conceal the job from the Outstanding Balance Report but this will now also remove it from the Orders On Hand Report. The toggle has been renamed as ‘Hide On Balance Reports’.
Invoice Admin Role
We have added an additional role for Invoice Admin. Moving forward only users with Invoice Admin will be able to Raise and Edit Invoices, Add Payments and Raise Credits.
Users who already have an Admin level role will be unaffected.
Please be aware this may mean that users within your business may no longer be able to action Invoices who could previously. They will need the role adding via the ‘Admin-Users’ area.
Business Pilot has a continual development cycle and all new features are included within your subscription. In fact, as a user, we encourage you to ask for more! That way, we all benefit from a continually improved system.
