Credit Requests are a great way to ensure you receive payment from clients before lessons take place. Although they are a handy way for clients to pay in advance, they do only Add Credit to a clients account. In order to deduct that credit, you would need to issue Invoices after the lessons have taken place as well. Not only does this tell the platform that they have used that credit, but it also means your clients accounting will be accurate and up to date (If you ever need to inspect that on their profile). So how do we ensure that any credit a client has used is deducted on an Invoice? We have a setting for this called 'Automatically Mark Invoices as Paid' within your branch settings.
What is Automatically Marking Invoices as Paid?
If you enable the option Automatically mark Invoices paid in System > Settings > Accounting Settings > General, TutorCruncher will look at the client's balance to see if they have the means to mark the invoice as paid whenever you raise an invoice and send it to the client. This setting will automate that process and that credit will be deducted from their account automatically.
Where can I see if a client has credit on their profile?
If you go to the Accounting tab on a clients profile, then you will see two different types of balances. The Invoice balance would reflect how much the client has been invoiced and any payments they have made to your agency. Credit Requests would be included in this figure, so this number represents the debt that the client owes to the company.
What happens if a client has credit, but it isn't enough for the total Invoice?
Not to worry, any credit that a client has will be deducted against a raised invoice, even if it only partially pays it. This means you can rest assured that all of the credit a client has will be used on invoices. Likewise, if they have more credit than the total of the invoice, then the remainder will still be assigned to their profile in the Invoice balance.
Will Clients be notified again when I raise Invoices?
Understandably you only want clients to receive one payment request for lessons, so you have the option to de-select clients from being notified when drafting and raising Invoices. Just as you're about to confirm those invoices, there will be a confirmation screen that gives a summary of the users that will be notified by email, it would then just be a matter of unchecking the Select All box.
When is a good time to raise Credit Requests & Invoices?
Generally speaking, Credit Requests would be at the beginning of the month for upcoming lessons, while invoices would be at the end of the month. You can do both of these on the same day at the end of the month. That way, you will be deducting any credit clients had off of the invoices for the lessons they received, while also issuing a Credit Request for the coming month.