Invoicing plan - Milestone billing
The invoicing plan feature is to schedule advancement payment of an order. Payments are based on the order’s completion progress.
Milestone creation
In Opencell you can use Invoicing plans (IPL), that allow you to invoice One Shot charges to the Billing account. This will be prior to the subscription creation. You can think of this feature as being user for projects which have a build phase (like a new SaaS solution implementation).
Invoicing plans are manager in the Customer care app. When you arrive on the page you will have a list view of all IPL existing on your environment.
From this page, you can use the search bar or the filter:filter:button to easily search for a specific IPL. You can also download all existing IPL via :Download: download button.
For creation, hit the :plus: button. You will then arrive on the IPL’s creation page. After entering Name and Label, hit ‘SAVE’ button. You will now have your new Invoicing plan. However, you will still need to add Invoicing plan lines (IPL), to define all the steps you wish to have on your IPL.
Hit the ‘CREATE’ button to start adding IPLs to your Plan.
After creating a few lines, you can see them directly on the plan, as below:
You are not obliged to create a IPL with the Advancement rate at 100% as the system will auto create a level that will be equal to it automatically.
Invoicing plan application
Now that we have seen the IPL creation, we will go into the different steps to apply it to one of our orders. Here are some rules to use invoicing plans in Opencell:
Invoicing plan can only be used for orders that are generated by a cotation
Invoicing plan can only be used on products that have at least a One shot other charge. If it’s not the case, then nothing will happen.
At each step of an Invoicing plan, an invoice will be generated.
When creating a quotation, you can chose to fill the Invoicing plan field as below:
This is not mandatory, and you can still change the Invoicing plan or add one once you are on the order generated from the quote’s validation, as you can see below:
In Opencell, when you select an Invoicing plan, the order’s behaviour will be different from the one it has without an IPL.
Available ‘VALIDATE’ button changes to ‘FINALIZE’. Once you hit ‘FINALIZE’, you will then start the IPL’s steps.
In our example we have created an IPL with down-payment of 30% and a progress percentage of 0%. By hitting thr ‘FINALIZE’ button, I have started the IPL, and I now have an invoice for the advance payement of 30%. I can visualize my invoice in the Related invoices section (bottom of the page).
Once I started the IPL progress for my order, I can see a new button has appeared: ‘UPDATE PROGRESS TO NEXT LEVEL’. This button will update automatically the progress the next IPL, and again, will generate automatically the invoice for advance payement in a “DRAFT” status.
When I finally arrive the last level, then my order’s status goes from “FINALIZE” to “COMPLETED” automatically, and the linked subscription is generated, and is only one click away.
