Studioware allows you to create invoices to make it easier to collect payments from your students. You can print or email the invoices, and the invoices can be paid online in the business portal. Studioware allows you to create invoices individually for select students, batch invoices for all students at one time, of use Studioware Automation to create invoices automatically once a month.
To view the list of invoices, click on the Invoices button on the main menu:
Studioware tracks the status of each invoice. The possible statuses are:
- Created: Indicates a newly created invoice
- Sent: Indicates the invoice has been emailed to the student/payee
- View: Indicates the student/payee/family has view the invoice on the business portal
- Partial: Indicates a partial payment has been made on the invoice
- PIF: Indicates that the invoice has been Paid In Full.
Invoices in Studioware are dynamic and are automatically recalculated. For example, assume you create an invoice for the current month and email the invoice to the student. If a student incurs an additional charge on their account (such as an additional tuition charge), the invoices is automatically recalculated to include the additional charge. Furthermore, Studioware only allows a student to have 1 active invoice at any time. When a new invoice is created for a student, all previous invoices are "Archived", and only the active invoice exists.
Creating an Invoice for a Student
To create an invoice for an individual student, open the student record, click on the Invoices button, and click on "Create Invoice".
Enter in the invoice start date, stop date, due date, invoice note, and invoice term. Click on the "Create" button to create an invoice for the selected student.
Creating Invoices for All Students
You can easily create and email invoices for all students in your business. Follows these instructions for create batch invoices:
- Click on Invoices in the main menu
- Click on Create Invoices
- In Step 1, select the start date, stop date, and due date for all invoices
- In Step 2, enter in the invoice note and terms:
- In step 3, select the miscellaneous setting. For example, you can elect to have Studioware email the invoices immediately after they are created. You can prevent invoices that have a zero balance from being emailed to students/families.
- Click on the Create Invoice button. The request to create the invoices is added to the invoice queue, and should be created in approximately 30 minutes:
Invoice Payments
Students/Families can make payments on the invoices in the Business Portal, or they may pay in person at your business. Studioware tracks the status of each invoice, including the amount paid, and the outstanding balance on each invoice. To manually add a payment on an invoice, follow these instructions:
- Search and open the student account whom your are receiving a payment for
- Click on Invoice in the student record
- Click on Payments
- Studioware will automatically start a "Payment (Invoice)" transaction for the current date.
- Enter in the amount of the payment, the payment type, and the transaction note.
- Click on the Save button to save the invoice payment transaction
Studioware has 2 Payment Transaction Types: "Payment" and "Payment (Invoice)". If a student/family is making a payment on an invoice, try and use the "Payment (Invoice)" transaction type. This allows Studioware to affiliate the payment with the invoice. It's not a problem if you select "Payment" for an invoice. Invoices in Studioware are dynamically recalculated when the underlying financial account is changed. Therefore, selecting "Payment" instead of "Payment (Invoice)" simply causes the invoice to be recalculated with a lower amount due balance.
Sorting and Filtering Invoices
Upon clicking on Invoices on the main menu, you will see the list of invoices for your students. You can sort the invoices by clicking on the column headers, change the page, and the number of invoices displayed per page:
Sometimes you may want to show all invoices in the grid. For example, if you need to email all invoices, or add a late fee to all invoice, select "All Invoices" in the number of invoices per page setting.
By default, only invoices that are active and not Paid-In-Full are displayed in the Invoice grid. Invoices that have been canceled, or Paid in Full for example, are initially hidden in the grid. that way, you can easily see which invoices are outstanding and may need a followup phone call or email to collect on. You can easily change the view on the invoice grid by clicking on the View menu item, and selecting the appropriate view. For example, if you want to see the list of Overdue invoices, click on View | Show Active Invoices that are Overdue. If you want to see invoices that are currently not overdue, but are due in the coming week, click on "Show Active Invoices that are due this week".
Email Invoices
To email one or more invoices, select the invoices you want to email by placing a check-mark next to each invoice. Please note, you can select all invoices for the email if needed by clicking on "All Invoice" in the page size, and clicking on the check-mark in the header. Next, click on the Email button, and click on "Send Invoices" in the confirmation window:
Canceling Invoices
You may want to cancel one or more invoices. To accomplish this, select one or more invoices, click on the Cancel button, enter in a cancel reason, and click on the "Cancel Invoices" button: