Group Billing Follow

Using Group Billing to Customize an Invoice

There may be situations where a customer needs an invoice to have wording or groupings that don’t match how you build orders nor the programming of any of your custom invoices.  Midnight includes the ability to create a custom Group Billing invoice at the order level that can be provided to the client without you having to change how you build your order or having to manually type the invoice in an editing program.  The Group Billing option does not affect your export nor your accounting system and is solely used to provide your customers with the data they need to properly pay the invoice.

After you’ve set up the order as normal (all services entered on the order), you can then create the Group Billing that will enable you to customize the wording.  While in the order, click on the Quick Links drop-down on the top-right corner of the screen. 

Select the Group Billing option within the drop-down. 

A screen will open up where you can create the details for the invoice.

In our example, we have a client that wants to see Services and Transportation broken out separately with no other line items showing on the invoice.  If this were a common scenario, I could use programming to create a custom invoice for this, but this is a one-off situation, but I do still want to provide my client with the data they need to pay.

In the group billing screen, in the first section, you will create the number of groupings needed for the invoice.  In our example, that will be 2 groupings.

Type in the number of groupings you wish to make and then click Create. Midnight will populate the screen with space to enter descriptions for the groupings.

In the Description fields, type in the description for each group as it should show on the invoice.  (Whatever you type will print as the description.)  You may also enter or select the quantity the client needs to see for each group.  (The drop-down has the quantities as entered in the system, but you may manually type any number in for the quantity.)

In the next section, all of the services on the order will display.  This section is for you to map the services to each grouping.  For each service, use the Sort ID to match it to the proper group by typing the Sort ID into the Sort field for each service. Do this for every line item on the order.

In this example, every item that should be under services will be assigned a '1' and all transportation items are assigned a '2'.

Once you are done, click the blue Refresh near the center of the screen.  The right-hand side of the screen will update with a preview of how the data will map on the invoice.  If all looks good, click the green Save & Close button. 

Closing the screen will return you to your order so you may now print the invoice.  Go to Reports using the red Reports button.

Select either the Invoice Group Billing or Invoice Price Group Billing (depending on whether you wish to show each grouping's pricing or just the overall invoice price) as those invoices will maintain the data as you set up under Group Billing.

Know that if desired, the standard Group Billing Invoices can be further customized with programming.  If the Group Billing Invoices are not turned on in your system, they have to be reactivated in Admin.  Our Knowledge Base article https://printreach.zendesk.com/knowledge/articles/360056077473/en-us?brand_id=1320286 includes details on how to turn on reports that have been deactivated.  You may turn on the two invoice layouts that have the words “Group Billing” in them.

If the setup for Group Billing should be copied when an order is copied, your Midnight Administrator can turn that on.  In Admin (the gear in the top-right hand corner of the screen), click on Global Settings within the Admin lists.   Go to the Estimates/Orders tab (within the blue menu under Global Settings).  If you wish for the Group Billing to be copied when orders are copied, you may enable the option by clicking the box for "Copy Group Billing Info On Order Copy" and then saving your changes by clicking the green Save button at the top of the screen.