Take advantage of automation to help you run operations. Allow your team to continue work without waiting for an admin to create a new period and guarantee your invoices are created on schedule by automatically renewing your ongoing services and setting up auto-invoicing.
Using this guide, you can:
Auto-Renewal
If your business has consistently recurring periods, rather than one of your staff having to manually create new periods, you can configure Accelo to generate a new period as the current one expires. When your periods auto-renew, any templated tasks will be set up and put on your staff schedules in real-time, and your clients can be automatically invoiced.
If your staff is working on any issue allocated to a retainer that is still open when the current period expires, their work will then be tracked against the new period.
Configuration
When you set-up your retainer, you can specify whether the retainer should Auto-Renew Periods by clicking the checkbox. You can also configure when a new period should be created in relation to the expiry date of the current period, e.g. Auto-renew 5 days before the latest period expires. Many clients choose to give a few days in between to alert clients of the auto-renewal, or to send out invoices.
Auto-Renew Invoicing
If you choose to auto-renew periods, Accelo can also automatically generate the period invoice.
You have a few options when auto-invoicing:
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Do Not Create an Invoice - The invoice will not be created.
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Create Invoice - Invoice created within Accelo, but not sent to your client.
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Create Invoice & Send Email - Invoice created and emailed to the default billing contact.
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Create Invoice & Fax - Invoice created and faxed to the default billing contact.
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Create Invoice & Notify accounts user - Invoice created and a copy is emailed to your accounts staff member for review/postage.
NOTE: When you first create a Retainer and set it to Auto Invoice, you need to manually invoice it for the first Period. This is due to the fact that automatic invoicing occurs based on the expiration date of the current Period (which does not occur for the first Period). Going forward, each time a Period is renewed, an Invoice will be auto-generated.
See the Invoicing page for more information on how these invoices are handled.