To notify customers about future payments for services that they use, Business Manager generates and sends them invoices - financial documents that contain payment information: who should pay for provided services, when they should do it, and what is a payment amount. The system generates and sends invoices as PDF files, but you can also view invoice details from the page Business Operations > Invoices.
Business Manager creates invoices for a subscription in the currency of the online store in which the subscriber purchased the subscription. For example, if your online store uses the euro currency for transactions, all invoices for the subscriptions purchased in this store will charge customers in the euro. You cannot change the currency of an existing subscription.
You can define when the system should issue invoices by selecting an appropriate billing mode. To learn more about possible billing modes and decide which one suits you best, read the section Understanding Billing Modes.
An addition to the billing mode, you can configure the following aspects of invoicing:
The tools to change these settings are located on the Business Setup > All Settings > Invoicing page.
Printable Invoices Appearance
Business Manager fills in printable invoices content (names and costs of the provided services, customer and provider information) according to the administrator's profile settings: country and language. For example, if the Admin user's country is Russia, the system will use the comma (",") as decimal part delimiter. If the country is the USA, the invoice will use the period ("."). To learn how to change the administrator's profile settings, see the section Configuring Administrator Interface.
The language of a PDF invoice form (names of the invoice fields) is the same as the language of the user who should pay this invoice. For example, invoices for customers from Germany will be written in German.
You can also change the formatting, style, and predefined content of the invoices to your liking. This includes, for example, changing invoice title, adding company logo, or changing font size. To learn how to edit the appearance of printable invoices, refer to the section Customizing PDF Invoices.
Invoice Numbering
Each invoice has a unique identifier - an invoice number. The format of the invoice number is defined by the invoice number template. The template is a line of text in which you can include a set of variables such as an invoice ID number (%%ID%%), the current year (%%CURYEAR%%), month (%%CURMONTH%%), and day (%%CURDAY%%), and so on. The complete list of the variables is shown on the Business Setup > All Settings > Invoicing page. For example, if you want to see a creation date as a part of an invoice number, include the following line into the template: %%CURYEAR%%-%%CURMONTH%%-%%CURDAY%%. When the system issues an invoice, it replaces the variables with their current values, for example, 2012-03-06.
If you have moved to Business Manager from another billing solution and want to continue the invoice numbering that you used previously, you can do it with the variable %%SEQ%% (invoice sequence). This is an integer value that increases by one after issuing an invoice. To make the system use your previous numbering, assign the value that continues this numbering to this variable and include it into your invoice template. For example, if you used integer identifiers starting from 1 in your invoice numbers and you issued one hundred invoices, set the invoice sequence value to 101.
Invoices and Accounting Entries
Invoicing is one of the many features used by Business Manager to create accounting entries. The basic accounting entries that the system creates for an invoice are the following:
You can define other accounting entries that the system will create after issuing an invoice. For example, the coupon cost: When someone uses a coupon, Business Manager will keep track of how much the plan they purchased would have cost without applying a coupon. The system creates the appropriate expense entries each time an invoice is created. Additionally, you can define the subscription cost to keep track of how much it costs you to create a subscription to a certain plan. For example, if a plan provides a dedicated IP address, your expenses on a subscription creation include the price of a new IP address. Business Manager will create these entries each time a new subscription to the selected plan is created.
Achieving Tax Office Compliance
For some organizations, it is obligatory to keep the originally generated invoices unchanged. However, when you re-send an existing invoice (from the invoice details page), the system re-generates the PDF invoice that may differ from the original file. The difference can be caused by changes to the system-wide settings like invoices language, or company details.
If your local tax office requires that you do not change invoice content once it is generated, save PDF copies of original invoices before modifying one of the following settings:
Note: Your customers can change invoice content as well, for example, by modifying their contact information.
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