Table of Contents
Join Dane Whitcomb as he demonstrates setting up installment billing for an Activity and walks through the billing fee creation process.
Activity Billing Part 1
Summary
In part 1, Dane reviews his activity section configuration and sets up an Installment Billing Template to associate with these sections.
Video
Transcript
Dane Whitcomb 0:06
In this video, we're going to be going over the first part of setting up activity billing. So the first step in setting up the billing would at least be having the programs created. So the activities and the activity sections, you do want to have the billing fees attached to. So in my example, here, we're just going to open up activity management. And we're going to be using this daycare activity as an example. So I've got one section tied to the activity with my begin and end dates on it. So we're going to say this daycare morning carry here is going to have monthly billing on it. And the first day is the first Monday of August, the seventh, and then the last Monday of December, which is the 25th Christmas day there. And then, once we have the activity section in place, I don't have any fees on it now, because the billing is going to be part of that.
The first step with setting up actual billing on it is going into installment billing Template Management in our menu. And so think of installment billing Template Management as the first step to the billing because it is basically the frequency and how many bills the customer is going to get. And it's going to determine, you know, when the first bill hits and all those settings like that. So it's pretty much the rules for the billing. So if you already have a template in here, for other activities that may work, you could link that one if you already have something built out. But in this case, we're gonna start from scratch, that data grid just shows the templates already created. So we'll call this activity, monthly billing. Since I did say this will be monthly. There is just one thing to note with billing, there's several different ways you can set things up. Depending on maybe your setup calls for a weekly billing, or bi weekly billing, I am doing monthly because seems to be the most common. But just know that there is a bunch of other billing options in here, I can quickly kind of go through those lists.
So I'm gonna give it a description of activity monthly billing. And then the first main setting here is the billing frequency and the dates. So I'm going to be choosing the monthly on this day option and say they're going to get charged on the first of the month, what that would mean, since our activity section is 487 as my begin date, so the next first of the month would be September 1. So that would be when the first bill hits. If I wanted to delay the start, you can do that through the skip bills. So if I did one here, it would skip the next verse of the month. So it'd be skipping the September 1 and actually charged a bill for October 1. But in my case, I don't want to do that. And then quickly, just to kind of show you some of the other options here, you can start with the begin date of the item, you can start with the begin date of the item in next month, the specific start date. So there's a few other options.
One thing to note with this specific start date, a lot of people like the sound of kind of what that option might provide. But if you do, pick a start date, like if I chose my September 1 as the first bill, I want everybody to start on that date, if you were to sign up, so if you were to allow enrollments after the begin date, so let's say somebody signs up halfway through maybe October 1, they're still gonna get a bill created for the September 1 date, because that is what I kind of hard coded here with my specific start date. So they're going to pretty much get a bill in the past when they enroll. You don't have to Build that but just know that would show up. And if that causes confusion, it's just something I think is good to know about beforehand. So I'm going to now switch back to my start with next billing cycle. I already said I'm not going to skip any bills, because I want the first one to charge on that September 1 number of bills, so you don't have to use this.
So number of bills, if I leave at zero, it's going to instead look at the item begin and end dates and say only create the correct number of bills based on my eight seven begin date and my 1225 end date. So however many monthly bills live between those date ranges, it's going to create bills for you could put in, you know six number of bills here. But kind of same thing with that specific start date. Like I mentioned before, if you sign up halfway through, you're still gonna get six bills created. So you wind up with maybe some extra bills there. So just something to keep aware of if you can, sometimes putting the number of bills to zero and just letting the rule here of the start with next billing cycle and that on zero determine the number of bills is the better way to go. And then renewal rules. So that's only for the past module for billing, so we don't need to worry about that we can just leave it as is.
And then the last part of the billing template, it would be the payment options. So this is the different methods people can get billed against. So, auto debit, Ach, you could, there is some additional setup to this option, but you could link a maybe a checking account. So it deducts from actual account versus a credit card. And then auto debit, credit card and installment bill are two of the more popular options here. So auto debit credit card, that would, at the end of each month are based on the Build date. So in my example, here, on the first of the month, when the bill hits, it would actually charge the customers card that they linked during the time of sale. So that would be kind of be the fully automated process there. Whereas installment bill is similar. They don't link a credit card at the time of sale. And when the billing date hits, it just puts the balance due on the household. So they could either go on WebTrac and pay it off with the credit card at that point. Or they could call in or when they stopped by the office, they could pay it so this one actually automatically charge a credit card, it's just going to put the balance on the household,
it is a good option to turn on when you initially create the template. Even if you don't think you'll end up using it, you can come back and turn it off. But what this allows you to do is easily test it without linking a credit card if you're just building it out initially and want to test how the bills look in the cart. So I'm going to turn those two on default Pay option B, if you think one of the options here is more popular than the others and you want it to default to that. So a lot of the time people would default that maybe to the auto debit ACH option. So I'd save my template here. And and here's a message saying I'm defaulting it to an option I don't have selected so I meant to say auto debit from credit card. So you have to default that to one of the toggles you have on there. So now I can save my template and now I have my quote unquote billing rules built out and the next step we will be creating the actual fees and linking them to the activity sections and we'll be using our billing template here. So that'll be the next part of the setup.
Activity Billing Part 2
Summary
In part 2, Dane walks through creating and linking your installment billing fees to your activity section.
Video
Transcript
Dane Whitcomb 0:06
In this video, we're going to be going over part two of the activity billing setup. So in the last video, we were in installment billing, Template Management. And we created our billing rules through our billing template, our activity monthly billing option. So now we're going to be going over actually creating the fees and linking them. So we're going to go into activity management. And the first step is just kind of deciding where you want to link the fees, whether that's at the actual activity, and assuming all the sections under are using the same billing setup and prices, that would work. If you do need specific fees for each section, you would be linking those to the section. So my case, we're going to say right now, I only have one section under this daycare. So we're going to link our fees to the activity level. So if I Click Change on my activity, and that's just saying, if I do create an afternoon care, that's going to be using the same pay structure and same prices and everything like that.
So I'm in my fees tab, and I currently have no fees linked. So usually with activity, billing, there is a pay in full option as well. So if you don't have a pay in full option, and you're only going to be offer billing, then you won't really need to do this part. But more often times than not, there is the option to pay the whole thing upfront. So for that case, I'm going to add a fee. And then the pay upfront fee is pretty easy. It's probably something you're already doing and used to. There's nothing really too special about that. So we're going to call it our pay in full. And we'll say for that whole August to December morning care, we're going to say that's $500 for pay in full. And we just need to link a revenue GL account. So we'll call activity revenue. And you can link criteria.
So for this whole setup here, there'll be an option if we want to do resident or non resident fees member versus non member fees, where you could link different criteria in there. So if you wanted this to just be a resident paying in full you could link your category or or your fee, code criterias. And just say these are for residents. In this case, we're going to say both non residents and residents pay in full was $500. Our pay in full option, so if you don't want to go with one of the billing options, and you just want to pay the whole thing up front, it's going to charge the $500 fee. Now we're going to go into the advanced fee add we're going to be creating the billing fee. And in order to do this, we do need to go into the advanced fee Screen. So we're going to use the advanced fee Add option there. And we'll keep this one we determined last time this was a monthly bill. So we'll keep it pretty straightforward and say our description we can call it monthly billing.
Again, if you're doing resident or non resident, you might want to give the description resident monthly billing or non resident monthly billing. And we'll keep it straightforward and say it's $100 a month will link our same revenue GL Code. And now that that's set, so that whole part was kind of the same as a normal fee. The next two steps here, kind of what makes it unique to billing. So the transaction Type, instead of being actually yeah, transaction Type, instead of being bill up purchase, not going to be purchased the fee Type sorry about that is going to be installment billing. So installment Bill fee, that's what's going to know that this is a billing fee. It's not just a purchase fee they're paying upfront. And then the next option is lightning. And what we created in the last video is our billing template. So in this installment Billing Option, you get the drop down list of all the billing templates that we have created in the system.
And the one we created last time was the activity monthly billing. This is what pulls in, charge the billing on the first day of the month. And all those settings we we set. So that's saved in there, we've got our GL Code, we've got our fee Type of installment Bill fee. And again, if you had resident or non resident criteria, you would want to identify it on that installment Bill fee as well. So now we have our monthly billing fee. And then another fee that most people would offer during a billing would be and this kind of depends how you how you operate the program, but is there a pay upfront fee when the billing option is chosen? So if I enroll on, my program starts on I think eighth, seventh to August 7 If I enroll on August 5 I'm not getting charged my first bill until September 1, so am I paying an upfront fee, when I first enroll, more often than not, you would be paying an upfront fee.
So to set one of those up, you would, we can go into the advanced add as well. And it's kind of a combination of the two fees we already set up. So we'll go over how to set up this upfront fee, to we'll call it first month fee. And we'll say this is also the $100 rate. And it's towards her activity revenue. And it is going to be a standard fee. So this is an installment billing. Now this is just the one time first month fee. And we do still want it linked to that billing template. So it knows the couple of this fee with the installment billing fee. So notice those two are tied together. So this is actually going to be activity monthly billing. And now we can save it. So at this point, we have our three fees created the monthly billing and the first month fee being tied together as our billing fees. And then are paying for as our separate pay upfront pay in full option.
So we have three fees here, if you were to do a non resident versus resident or member versus non member setup, you might have six fees here. And on the three resident ones, you'd have your resident criteria, and on your three non resident, you'd have your non resident criteria. So at this point, we could save. And the next step would just be going into global sales and testing this out and making sure the bills look how we want and all those things like that. There might be some trial and error before you have the program go live. So you just want to make sure all the bill dates are correct. So we can really pick any family member here. Since I don't have any resident or non resident specific fees all the fees should apply to everyone the same. If you are doing non resident and resident, you might want to test with both a non resident and resident member or household. So here, I'm just going to be going into the morning care section.
And again, it starts on August 7, which is actually today's date. So here's the option of the ways you can get billed this was chosen on the installment billing template. So I think I mentioned in the last video video, you might want to leave install it bill on when you're initially testing, because this will allow you to add the bill to the cart and see the billing schedule without actually linking a credit card. So we'll choose the installment Bill option here. And you can see it is charging $100 in the shopping cart already gonna load that into the cart here in one second. So the $100 is that pay upfront fee. And if we select the item in the cart, and actually hit this handy update bill from Cart Button, you can see what the billing schedule would be like. So here as we this is kind of as we were hoping it would go. So it did do everything according to plan here, it created our first bill, oops, from September 1. So our upfront fee is really acting as our August payment. And then we're paying a bill on nine one on 10 111 One and 12 one. So we didn't put our number of bills in that template.
If you remember in the last video, it just automatically created the for bills based off for item dates. So that all went as planned. On the fly here, you can add a new billing record if you need to delete a billing Record Update fees, this can all be done in here. But this was just kind of your your, if you were setting up any of the Build templates and more completely sure this just be your way to check it before going live. You'd want to make sure the dates look right here the fees look right total life over the billing periods 400. But my upfront amount is 100. So that's 500 total, which is the same as my pay in full fee. So that'd be the other thing to do. Just make sure you're paying for option works. Shouldn't be too many issues with that one since it is more of a straightforward fee but make sure that adds to cart as $500 There it is. So this is just an overview on a on a relatively simple activity billing setup, but it is more of a common setup where they are getting billed monthly. And there's a pay in full option and a billing option.