Guide to recurring invoices
System
Posts: 412 admin
Guide to recurring invoices
Recurring invoices allow you to save time, plan ahead, and ensure you always get paid on schedule. They are often the most convenient solution for your regular or subscription customers. Here you'l...
0
Comments
Variable would be a great addition to this. %year%/May/15 - %year+1%/May/14 would be one format in particular I need.
Thanks @ReneJ and noted! Passing this along to our Product team now for your consideration.
A little more detail in regards to recurring invoices...
I invoice for website storage. It is an annual fee and is recurring. When I invoice it would be nice to indicate the term, based on the invoice date, or on a specific date as indicated in my previous post.
An invoice being sent today with %year%/May/15 - %year+1%/May/14 being in the description would show to the customer as 2019/May/15 - 2020/May/14
If you set up a recurring invoice with the first invoice being sent on today's date, when will the invoice be sent? I have set one up and expected it would be sent automatically, but it hasn't. Are recurring invoices sent at a specific time? Thank you!
Second with @ReneJ...
Having the ability to add custom variables (i.e. specific month/day/year, client's name) will be great!
I bill my client on the first day of the month for previous month... for me month-1 will be great!
@PopYourCareer It depends on how you setup the recurring invoice. If you set it up so that it repeats every month on the first (for example) it will send on the following month if you have created it today (Feb 1st) --- you basically just need to adjust the dates as to when the invoice will be sent out etc in order for it to be sent out immediately (making the date the 2nd so it's sent out tomorrow when you create the invoice).
This looks promising, but the current auto-generation lacks for renting out something on a monthly schedule. Ie. I'd love to be able to do something like thus:
1) Auto-generate and send out on day Xth of the month (already works)
2) Being able to specify in the description text that this is to cover rent for the following month. Like if generated on Feb 15, say "Rent for Match 2019"
3) Being able to specify the payment date as the 1st of the following month - don't care how long the month is in which I generate the invoice, I just want rent money to be payable on the 1st.
If the customers card has expired or declines a charge, how do we (the wave merchant) and they (customer) know?
@jk108 you'll see a notification in Sales > Payments tab, explaining that we couldn't charge the card and a brief description why. You can also contact us directly with a support ticket and we can check in more depth, if you prefer to go that route!
@jsorensen we appreciate you sharing your feedback about the potential customization features you'd like to see in the recurring invoice scheduler!
> @jk108 you'll see a notification in Sales > Payments tab, explaining that we couldn't charge the card and a brief description why. You can also contact us directly with a support ticket and we can check in more depth, if you prefer to go that route!
>
@Ryan_W so we have to log in and check manually? Why isn’t there an email notification?
I too would like month -1
Virgil
@jk108 You would get an in-app notification on the recurring invoice page that the payment failed. No email or push notification as of just yet. What we do is first try the auto-payment, then if it fails, we send the invoice to the customer instead of the receipt as a signal that they need to pay for it.
@RMLawncare Instead of billing your customer the total amount on the recurring invoice (for the season), you would need to simply just charge the monthly amount instead (you will just need to create a product & service that only accounts for the monthly amount, rather than the seasonal total).
It would be nice to be able to schedule an invoice to be generated every month on the 3rd Monday of the month but it looks like that option is not available.
I found out from Tech support, that once a recurring invoice is created as a draft or sent... It cannot be deleted. So if you decide that you dont want to send it, it still stays on your list. Even if you delete that old customer's information from your files , their recurring invoices still stay on your file.
I think there should be a way to be able to delete recurring invoices, just like regular invoices can. I think that recurring invoice option is a great time saver. ( that is one feature that i liked about it ) But i I don't know if i want every invoice ever created in the history of my business , old and new, to stay on my account. Thats a lot of wasted space in my opinion.
I have a karate school and I send out automatic tuition invoices monthly. Is there a way to have the monthly invoice reflect the open account balance if the student didn't pay the prior month(s)?
Hey @dansx6 - not at the moment, but this would be a really cool feature to implement. So ideally instead of setting a monthly (or other frequency) price, you could instead have a running balance, which is reduced by a regular payment amount? Do you charge interest for a missed payment, and would you like the balance to be increased by interest?
Hi @Samd, What you describe would work perfectly. I don't charge a late payment currently but that is something I have been considering.
I'm glad to hear it @dansx6
Hi. Currently there seem to be no way to add an initial amount to be charged, what's known as a trial period on subscriptions, like Stripe and others do - https://stripe.com/docs/billing/subscriptions/trials#combining-trials-with-metered-plans.
More than offering a fee trial period, what I actually need is to be able to calculate a prorated amount to be charged first, before my regular invoices will be generated. I want all my subscriptions to start on the 1st of the month to simplify my workflow. So I need to be able to prorate whatever is left until the 1st after which regular invoices are generated. Currently I simply have to setup my subscription to start on the 1st and would have to create another invoice for the prorated part.
Trial and prorated would be the same feature and it would work for free or a prorated value.
You're almost there currently as you offer the option to send the first invoice at a different date. What you need to add now is a way to overwrite the invoice total. To make that happen you could add a new line to that first invoice that goes into the Discount Given Account with our choice of what it says: ie: Discount Given / Prorated Amount / Trial offer ... That's one way to do it anyway.
Please consider adding it.
Thanks!
Question: how do customer manage their current subscriptions? How can they update their credit card info. Or cancel the subscription? Is there a client dashboard? Is there a way to add this options/ links into a client dashboard on our website? Do you have an API this can be achieve with?
Hey @DonChipriani! I see that you just joined the Wave Community, so welcome! We are happy to have you
At the moment, recurring invoicing in Wave works by duplicating the recurring invoice as it is created and then auto-sending them (and in cases allowing you to charge or auto-charge). As you have discovered, adding an automated prorated fee to an invoice would likely mean creating an invoice outside of the recurring invoice set to ensure that the customer is billed correctly. I totally acknowledge that this makes a subscription based billing service like yours, more labour intensive, especially when you are looking for options that are customer facing for customization, as Wave doesn't currently offer this sort of functionality in its current form.
Building out this sort of functionality likely means a transformation to the way that Wave functions, however, you have raised some really solid points and provided some really great ideas. I'll be happy to share these suggestions with our team, however, in full transparency the features that you have shared are not on our current roadmap as it stands, mainly because we are in the process of perfecting 2 major payment processing features that are currently Beta for North American users (Instant Payouts and Invoice Advance), which we consider to be game changers.
In saying that, I 'd love to hear from some other Wavers to see how they currently use Wave for subscription billing!
On an unrelated note, I just stumbled across the Blog on your website and have definitely bookmarked a couple of articles for my personal reading list!
@Samd > Hey @dansx6 - not at the moment, but this would be a really cool feature to implement. So ideally instead of setting a monthly (or other frequency) price, you could instead have a running balance, which is reduced by a regular payment amount? Do you charge interest for a missed payment, and would you like the balance to be increased by interest?
Could you please clarify where Wave currently is with this? I too was looking for a way to have a recurring invoice that invoices based on a balance that changes based off of payments made. For example, I use this program for our vacation rental reservations. If the reservation is for $3,000, I would like to send an initial invoice for $3000, the guest pays $500, then the next (recurring) invoice would invoice them for $2,5000, then $2,000, etc. Kind of like an installment plan, or the way that the credit card company would bill you (but without the interest).
I was not entirely clear with your response to @dansx6 , but it sounded like you were saying that it is currently NOT possible to do this, but it considered for future enhancement. Is that correct? It sounds like this would be a feature that a lot of people could benefit from.
Thanks in advance!
Hey @christi , thanks for reaching out! I would be happy to clarify, so like Sam & Jordan mentioned above, this is a really great feature request and I completely understand how useful it would be to you and many more I'm sure, but it is not currently on our roadmap.
Right now the function of recurring invoices is to duplicate the initial invoice that is created and send it out on a recurring schedule set by you. Thank you for reaching out with your question, and providing us with some context, I will be sure to pass your feedback along but as I mentioned this feature is not on our immediate roadmap.
Hi @DeBreeD3sign . When adding a customer to your Recurring Invoice, the customers do actually populate in alphabetical order. If what you're actually looking to do is have your Recurring Invoices sorted in their respective page by customer (alphabetized), I'm afraid this isn't currently possible. Your best alternative would be to search for the specific customer at the top of the page, where the customers also populate in alphabetical order.
i saw some discussion here about filling in the date as a variable. Was there any progress on this?
I have a requirement to indicate the month of service in the description
(e.g. invoice for june 1-june30).
Being able to use the %Y %m %d stuff would really help, otherwise i cannot use the recurring invoice feature.
@donbowman I'm wondering if your request is related to this thread here? https://community.waveapps.com/discussion/comment/19266#Comment_19266
Can you expand on what you'd like to see in the above thread? ^
Can you say more about the requirement to have dates in the service description?
Suggestion to invoice a way to include variables on a recurring invoice. Some of my clients mandate that I include what month I'm invoicing them for. So it could be %month% and it would include the current month. Other clients need which quarter, so perhaps %quarter% or something similar could be included on the recurring invoice.
Could you elaborate a little more in terms of what you're requesting here @seanvo? I would just need a bit more context so that I could potentially bring this up as a feature request at some point. Let us know when you get a chance!