Generating invoices - Creating a billing run

You can create bill runs for individuals, groups, school levels or even for your entire school population. MySchool finance is easy to use, and a valuable time-saving functionality for any fee-paying institute. Create billing runs within a few simple steps. Open your Invoice list view and click New Invoice Let's look at some of the possibilities;

Invoice Context & Request Overview

Choose the organisation you wish to bill from, and the relevant academic year. You can invoice for next year, but understand the invoice list view will only show invoices from the current academic year. You can use the filters on the list view if you wish to view invoices from future or past years. 

The student invoiced field brings up the people picker, allowing finance teams to choose their target population.

During testing, please check out how discounts are applied, especially for siblings. The option 'bill in group' when applied to a fee, is important to understand when creating your billing runs.

If you are using dynamic fees then you can choose a large population and let the system determine the correct tariff. This is useful if your invoice payers have siblings attached and only wish to receive one invoice with all details.

The other option would mean that you create a billing run per school level or class level. The invoice payer with siblings will receive two invoices, and if the fee does not have 'should apply within group' activated then they will still receive the sibling discount.

Note that the users must have access to the parent portal in order to recover the PDF invoice. This is not sent by email. The notification invites the invoice-paying guardian and associated payers to log into MySchool.

Payment through credit will force the system to take into account any credit amount in an individual's balance and apply it to the raised invoice. 

Schedule your invoices

You don't need to publish immediately and can prepare your billing runs to be published when you need to. The status will be set to scheduled. They will be published with the daily system update, normally performed between 00h-04h00 local time.

Due Date

Set the payment date limit, after this date has passed invoices will show as overdue in the status column. 

You can then use invoice templates to send reminders.

Apply a dynamic fee or ad hoc item

You create your fees when you build your organisation. These are known as dynamic fees as they allow you to have different amounts per school level, class level, subject and more. These are available in the drop-down list. 

You can apply multiple dynamic fees to the bill run. Upon adding the first select again from the drop-down list. You can also add a one-off ad hoc fee, or just use the ad hoc fee lines to invoice for extraordinary items that are not included in the fee tables.

Add a label, amount and an appropriate account. Apply a fixed fee discount if needed. You can add as many line items as required.

Build your preview to check before publishing

Don't forget to build the preview before publishing. It is always advisable with any MySchool functionality, to check that it is correct. You can even edit individual invoices and add personalised individual notes if needed. If you open the preview, you can view the actual PDF copy to make sure your template is correct and shows the line items you have selected.

If all is good then use the action button Issue Invoices in the bottom right-hand corner of the slideover. A confirmation pop-up will appear, stating how many students will be invoiced. Confirm you wish to go ahead and publish.

Nb: For large schools, producing billing runs across school levels, with multiple fees, and the process of publishing may take some time. Please do not close the page or stop the process during this phase. You may duplicate your tab and work on another invoice or module of MySchool, whilst the fees are generated.