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Working with Credit Requests

Request upfront payment from your clients using credit requests

Sam Linge avatar
Written by Sam Linge
Updated over a year ago

What is a credit request?

A credit request is an upfront request from a client for payment. Once the credit request is paid, the client's balance will go up. Then, as lessons are invoiced against their name, the client's balance will reduce accordingly. The client's balance can be viewed from their profile or from Accounting > Client Balances.

Credit requests can be created in two different ways:

  1. Created individually and unrelated to planned lessons

  2. Created from planned lessons in the calendar

Can I invoice for all my lessons ahead of time?

By planning future lessons on your jobs, you are able to send Credit Requests to your clients based on the planned lessons in a certain date range. These planned lessons can be added to your jobs by either a tutor or an administrator.

Once you have lessons in the future in your calendar, you can navigate to Accounting > Draft Credit Requests and click 'Regenerate'. You can specify the date range for lessons which you want to be included in your Credit Requests to ensure that you only bill your clients for lessons in a specific date range.

Invoice your clients a month ahead of time.

Invoice your clients a month ahead of time.

You will now have a series of draft credit requests. You can review these and make any changes to them before raising them if you wish.

How do I charge clients upfront/ahead of time?

Charging clients ahead of time can be done in two ways.

If you know when the lessons are going to take place, then you go to a job and create lessons in the future. Once they exist, you will be able to create Credit Requests for all of your client's planned lessons within a certain date range.

Alternatively, if you don't know when a lesson is going to happen, and just want the client to prepay an amount to be allocated to lessons later, then you can go the client's page and click the Add Credit Request button (under the Credit Requests panel) to send one.

Once a lesson has a Credit Request associated to it, you will be able to see this on the lesson's page.

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 complete.

When you approach the end of a given month, you will need to generate a proper invoice to send to the client, both for you to reconcile your books and for the clients to receive a breakdown of the lessons received and lesson reports.

With Automatically mark invoices paid enabled, the invoice will be marked as paid in TutorCruncher and that will show in the email the client receives.

How to create Credit Requests from planned lessons

If you have planned future lessons in your jobs, you can send credit requests to get your clients to pay for all of their lessons within a specific date range. This method allows you to quickly and easily get upfront payments for all planned lessons.

Step by step process

  • To create a Credit Request, you will first need planned future lessons in your jobs.

  • Once they exist, proceed to your Accounting > Draft Credit Requests and click 'Regenerate'.

  • Here, you can specify the date range for the credit requests to only include lessons within a specific timeframe.

  • By default, all planned lessons in the future will be included. If a lesson already has a Credit Request associated with it, it will not be included.

  • Now that you have your Draft Credit Requests, you can review them and edit them if you need to make changes.

  • To send a Draft Credit Request, you will need to confirm it by moving it to the right-hand side and then click 'Raise Confirmed Credit Requests'. Your client will then be notified via email.

When you approach the end of a given month, you will need to generate a proper invoice to send to the client, both for you to reconcile your books and for the clients to receive a breakdown of the lessons received and lesson reports.

If you don’t know when the lessons are going to take place, and just want the client to prepay an amount to be allocated to lessons later, you will need to create a regular credit request.

More information

How to send a Credit Request and top up a client's account

A Credit Request is an upfront request from a client for payment. Once the credit request is paid, the client's balance will go up. Then, as lessons are invoiced against their name, the client's balance will reduce accordingly. If you know when and how often the lessons are going to take place, go to the tutorial for a credit request created from a job.

Step by step process

  • There are two ways to top up a client’s balance

  • Either you can send them a Credit Request - an email with an attached proforma invoice - requesting them to top up their account

  • or you can top up their account manually.

  • To send someone a Credit Request, you can go to a client’s page then click 'Add Credit Requests'.

  • Alternatively, you can also create a Credit Request from Accounting > Credit Requests.

  • Fill in the description and amount fields.

  • If 'Sent Immediately' is ticked, the client will then be emailed the Credit Request. If it isn’t, you will be able to review the PDF the client will receive before it's sent off.

  • The client now gets the Credit Request emailed to them, in an email that is customisable in System > Settings > Communications Settings > Email Definitions.

  • You can then mark the Credit Request as paid when you receive payment, and the amount will be added to the client’s balance.

  • If you want to top up a client’s balance manually, simply click the 'Adjust Balance' button on a client’s page.

When you approach the end of a given month, you will need to generate a proper invoice to send to the client, both for you to reconcile your books and for the clients to receive a breakdown of the lessons received and lesson reports.

More information

How do I send my draft Credit Requests?

If you have Credit Requests on the Draft Credit Requests screen, then these have not yet been sent to your clients. You will need to click the arrows next to the items in order to confirm and then raise them. Take a look at our tutorial video for how to do so.

How do I create and send an individual Credit Request?

You can send Credit Requests by navigating to Accounting > Draft Credit Requests, and clicking the 'Create' button. Fill in an amount, a category, a description, specify the client and their student, then click 'Submit'. You can choose to keep the request in a draft stage to send later or send it immediately by selecting the 'Sent Immediately' box.

Your client will receive an email notification and they'll be able to pay the Credit Request by card or according to your payment preferences.

How do I pay a Credit Request?

If you are a client, you can pay a credit request by navigating to the Credit Requests tab and clicking on the Credit Request. The next page will allow you to view the Credit Request PDF and pay using Stripe. Alternatively, if you are an administrator, you can manually mark a Credit Request as paid or pay using Stripe. Navigate to Accounting > Credit Requests, and click on the Credit Request. Click the 'Pay with Stripe' button or the 'Mark as Paid' button to record the payment.

How do I delete a credit request?

If there is an issue with a raised credit request that you want to erase, then you can navigate to Accounting > Raised Credit Requests, & click on the credit request that you want to delete. At the top of that page, there is a tab for ‘Delete’ which will erase that request. That credit request will no longer be viewable to the client when they log into their account.

If I delete a credit request, will this deduct that credit from their account?

If a user has not paid for a credit request yet, then you can simply delete that payment request and the client would not be able to complete payment on that either through their login or via email. There may be some instances though that a client has paid a credit request and you want to void/delete that. If this is the case, then it would be a matter of doing a 'Balance Correction' on the users account and issuing a refund for that outside of the platform.

What is assigned credit?

Assigned credit is a function within TutorCruncher which allows you to allocate credit to a particular job. It is useful if your clients pay upfront to have lessons with a particular tutor, or for a particular job.

If you want to use assigned credit you will need to do the following:

  1. Go to System > Settings > Activity and select Use Assigned Credit.

  2. Go to the Job where you would like to assign credit.

  3. Select the pen and paper icon next to the student's name, and select the Assign Credit check box.

  4. Enter the amount you wish to assign from the client's credit to that job, and click 'Save'.

Once you have done this the client in question will have a certain amount of credit allocated to be used for that particular job.

N.B: Assigned credit only limits the amount of credit that can be spent on a job for a client. That credit is not just limited to that job, so it can be used against any raised invoices.

Can I write off a client's current positive balance against future credit requests?

If you bill your clients monthly in advance, you may want to write off any unspent credit remaining from the prior month against the credit request which you will be sending them for the upcoming month.

To do that, the first thing to do is go to System > Settings > Accounting Settings > General and checking the box for "Automatically mark Credit Requests paid". At the same time, make sure you have System > Settings > Accounting Settings > General > "Automatically Mark Invoices Paid" turned on.

In order to have the correct outstanding balance on your clients' accounts, you must first draft and raise invoices. Once raised, the invoices will write off the cost of the clients' lessons against their Invoice Balance. This will leave any remainder available to be written off against the upcoming Credit Requests.

When you next draft Credit Requests you will see tags beside all Credit Requests drafted for clients who have an outstanding Invoice Balance on their account. The tags will read either "Part Paid" or "Fully Paid" depending on the level of outstanding Invoice Balance.

When raised, clients will either be asked to pay only the outstanding amount on the Credit Request (if any). If there is no payment due, then the entire Credit Request total will be written off against their invoice balance, and the client will not be asked to pay.

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