Automatic Billing From the Calendar
This week, we launched an exciting new feature on Studio Helper that’s been requested many times by our customers: the ability to automatically invoice lessons from the calendar.
The studios who will love this feature the most are those who charge on a “per lesson” basis, where students are invoiced a different amount each month depending on how many lessons were scheduled. Studios who charge a flat monthly fee or on a semester basis may not find as much use for this, but could still use it to charge for specific events.
To pull in lessons from the calendar onto an invoice, you first need to do the following:
- Create a package that is set to “Per Lesson” (Settings -> Packages)
- Register a student for that package within their profile. (People List -> Student profile -> Registration section)
- On the calendar, in the “Participants” area, after selecting the student(s) who will attend the lesson, choose the appropriate package from the list.
Now you have everything in place to have calendar lessons pulled into an invoice. To create an invoice that does this, go to the regular invoice creation screen (Money -> Invoicing -> New Invoice). Select the client(s) you want to invoice, and then click the checkbox underneath the client list that says, “Enable Automatic Billing from Calendar”.
Once you do this, a yellow box will appear that lets you choose the start date and the period. For example, if you choose July 1st as the start date, and 1 month as the period, it will grab all the lessons from the calendar in the month of July. Click the “Update” button and it will show all of these lessons for you right there on the invoice! You can see the cost of each lesson (according to the package) and remove any lesson you don’t want to invoice for at this time. Studio Helper keeps track of which lessons have been invoiced so you don’t have to worry about double billing.
Note that if you are invoicing multiple clients at once, the actual lessons do not show up on the invoice until after you have created it.
Making it Recurring
If you want to automate this process further, you can click the checkbox that says “Make this a recurring invoice”, at the bottom of the invoice creation screen. If this is enabled, Studio Helper will automatically recreate this invoice according to the period you specify, and it will automatically pull in the lessons from the calendar for whatever period the invoice covers. It’s a great time-saving feature, and coupled with on-line payments via Paypal, gives you near “hands-off” invoicing.
We hope you enjoy this new addition to Studio Helper. We’d love to hear what you think. If you have any questions about how to use this near feature, don’t hesitate to contact our support team.
