A consolidated invoice is one invoice that consolidates billable items from multiple tasks for a single client. This process is commonly requested from large clients that manage multiple portfolios.
Uptick's consolidated invoicing workflow uses the logic of parent-child task relationships to create and send one invoice from a single 'parent' task which inherits all the billable items from its 'child' tasks. Once a task has been added under a 'parent' task, this relationship allows you to not only create and send one invoice for all the 'children' tasks, it also allows you to send any child service reports or defect quotes at the same time, all in one email.
In this article, however, we focus on the need to consolidate and send just the invoice.
Setting up
Set up your system:
Local invoice PDF generation needs to be enabled under Control panel > Accounting > Edit
By enabling this, your whole system will start to use Uptick's invoice templates to send any invoice in Uptick, rather than using your accounting integration's template format.Uptick offers two free consolidated invoice templates. Identify which one you want to use by going to Control panel > Document Templates > Uptick library templates > choose either or both depending on which format your client/s wish to view their invoice in.
If you want to customise these templates, submit a request to customise. You can create as many templates as you want for a fee.A preview of what our free templates looks like:
Per Property Summary + final, summed total at the end:
A detailed view that lists every billable item for each child - one table per task + final, summed total at the end:
Set up the clients that wish to be sent consolidated invoices:
Add billing requirements to all your clients that need invoice consolidation by going to Users > Clients > Update:
Fill out the billing requirements text box describing the consolidated invoicing requirements. This will be displayed to all staff who try to invoice or dispatch a task for this client.
Tick manual billing. This will stop staff from dispatching a task's invoice for this client without reading and accepting the billing requirements. This will help prevent staff from sending invoices prematurely before they are consolidated at the end of the week/month etc.
Contact support and ask them to create a custom task status for you to use called 'To be consolidated'. You should be moving any tasks that need to be consolidated into this status, ready to be consolidated at a later date.
Set up permissions:
Make sure all staff who need to create and send consolidated invoices have the Can bulk create and send invoices permission.
Consolidating tasks
Forming the parent-child task relationship
At the end of the week/month when you are ready to consolidate and send your invoices, find tasks needing to be consolidated under parent task using the following filters:
On your task list, filter for status = To be Consolidated
Optional: also filter for the clients you manage
Required if you only manage some of the clients that need consolidated invoices in your companyBulk edit all the tasks listed as a result of the filters above by clicking > Edit (x) tasks > Consolidate invoices (with preview)
In the new tab that opens, review all the tasks to be consolidated. The system will suggest consolidating each task which has the same client and billing card.
Once reviewed, click Consolidate tasks.
A parent task will be created for each group of tasks, allowing you to prepare and dispatch a consolidated invoice from each parent.
Fields populated on parent task:
Task name | Naming format is: |
Category | Uses the default task category for billing tasks |
Office assignee | The person that consolidated the tasks |
Due Date | End of the current month |
Task status | Office Review |
Client | Client associated with the child tasks |
Billing card | Billing card associated with the child tasks |
Property | Property is only set if all children are from the same property |
Branch | Branch is only set if all children are from the same property |
Invoice parent tasks
Go to the Tasks list
In the search bar, search for "consolidated invoice"
For each parent task, view the task and click Create Invoice. The preview screen displays all billable items from the child tasks. Each child task can be clicked into, reviewed and corrected as required.
Once reviewed and happy with what will be invoiced, click Create Invoice
Click Update to pick which invoice template you want to use for this client. Some clients might want to have their invoices formatted differently. Click Save to commit your choice.
You can preview what the invoice will look like by clicking Preview. Once you're satisfied you can return to the task and click Dispatch to send out the consolidated invoice.
Any reports or finalised defect quotes from children will appear on the dispatch page.
NOTE: If your client requires a CSV sent to them rather than a PDF, there is a workaround: When Previewing the invoice, you are able to highlight > copy > paste the data into a spreadsheet.
Want to consolidate fixed billing tasks?
If a client needs you to consolidate fixed billing tasks from multiple properties or you wish to add any of these invoices to other repair, maintenance or reactive works follow the below steps:
Go to your Billing Contract list and filter for all the contracts that you wish to consolidate.
Use the bulk edit on this page and pick the 'Create tasks with no invoices' option.
Now that all your fixed billing has been made into tasks, you can use the task list's bulk edit to change the status into 'To be Consolidated'.
You can now follow the above Consolidating Tasks process.