There are two ways to create a Credit Request. Both start from Accounting > Draft Credit Requests.
A) Create a Credit Request unrelated to any planned Lessons
If you want to charge a Client ahead of time, but you’re not yet sure when their Student’s Lessons are going to take place, you can create a Credit Request for that Client regardless by following these steps:
From Accounting > Draft Credit Requests, select the Create button to open the Create a Credit Request panel.
You will need to specify the Credit Request’s amount, a description for the Credit Request and a paying Client.
You can also specify a category for the Credit Request, a Sales Code and a specific Student attached to the paying Client.
Enable the ‘Send Immediately’ checkbox to raise the Credit Request immediately - disabling this will keep the Credit Request in your drafts.
Click Create.
Creating a Credit Request.
You can alternatively create a Credit Request from the Client's own record. Go to People > Clients > select the Client > Accounting and select the Add button within the Credit Requests panel - this opens the same Create a Credit Request panel with that Client already filled in.
An example of a Client’s Accounting tab, with the Credit Requests panel highlighted.
Once a Lesson has a Credit Request associated with it, you will be able to see this on the Lessons page. Furthermore, when the Credit Request has been marked as paid, the Client's Available Balance and Invoice Balance will increase. Their Available Balance will decrease as the Lessons are marked as completed.
B) Creating a Credit Request for planned Lessons
When your Jobs have Lessons planned in the future, you can regenerate Credit Requests to be sent to your Clients for these specific Lessons. This feature is particularly useful for any organisations that utilise an upfront billing system with their Clients.
Say it was August and you had planned Lessons for the following month of September, and you wanted to create Credit Requests to pay for these Lessons in advance:
From Accounting > Draft Credit Requests, select the Regenerate button to open the Regenerate Credit Requests panel.
Specify a date range for the Credit Requests to be generated for using the ‘Cutoff Start/End Date fields’ - in this instance you would specify the start/end of September.
Click Regenerate.
The regenerated Credit Requests should now appear on the Draft Credit Requests panel on the left hand side. You can review these and make any changes to them before raising them if you wish.
Regenerating Credit Requests for September.
As you approach the end of September, you would want to regenerate an Invoice for the now-completed Lessons, both so that you can reconcile your books and so that the Clients can receive a proper breakdown of the Lessons they’ve received alongside any Lesson Reports.
With Automatically mark Invoices paid enabled under System > Settings > Accounting > General, the Invoice will automatically be marked as paid in TutorCruncher and this will be reflected in the email the Client receives.