Auto-Generating Invoices (desktop version)

Atlas uses the Auto-Generate Invoices tool to create batches of invoices all at once. The tool is based off of Billing Records, which you create and manage on the Billings Tab of a Profile Record. By creating Billing Records for any recurring invoice that you want to run in bulk, you can have the Revenue Item, credit and debit account numbers, Billing Cycle and other information regarding the invoice set up ahead of time. This is the preferred procedure for invoicing anything that should happen on a regular, recurring basis. Click here to learn about setting up Billing Records. Keep in mind that the Auto-Generate tool will create an invoice for ALL billing records in your system that fit your search criteria. This allows you to run non-dues billings for members AND non-members, which is why it's important to ensure that dues billing records are set as expired when dropping members!

Follow these steps to Auto Generate Invoices:

1. Go to Revenue > Auto Generate Invoices from the menu bar. or click Auto-Generate Invoices from the Quick Actions Revenue Toolbar. The Auto Generate Invoices window will open.
2. Select the Month for which you would like to generate invoices. This will pull from the Anchor Month listing in your billing records. You can also select a specific Revenue Item to generate, or you can leave this at "All."
3. Set the Invoice Date. Note: This is NOT the Due Date; this is just the Invoice Date. The Due Date will be based on the Anchor Month and Anchor Date set within the Billing Record.
4. The Apply Year will default to the current year - be sure to change this to the next year if you are generating invoices for January/February/etc. at the end of the year
5. Add an optional Memo to appear printed on your invoices.
6. Click Preview Invoices to Generate to find all billing records that meet the criteria you have entered. They will be displayed in the data grid below.
   
   Notes:
   
   When you click Preview, the system checks to see if there is anything preventing the billing records you searched for from having invoices created. This may include being checked to bill manually, the billing expiring, or a duplicate invoice already exists. Any items that fit one of those criteria will be displayed in red, and you can click the link "Invoices will not be created - click here to view these items" to see them.
   
   Click the link to view the invoices that will not be created (if there are none, you will not see the link and can skip this step). You will see three options next to each one. You can choose to simply remove the item from the batch completely, or for billings that already have an invoice created, you can click View Billing (to open the billing record itself) or View Invoices (to see the invoice the system found as a duplicate). You can update these if necessary before returning to the Auto-Generate screen.
   
   
7. If there are invoices you do NOT want to create in the Auto-Generate routine, select those billings in the data grid and use the Actions drop-down menu to remove them.
8. Click the Generate Invoices button. All billings displayed in the datagrid will be submitted to the Auto-Generate routine to be created, and an email will be sent to the email address listed in the Email Address to Notify When Complete: box the top.
9. After the invoices have been created, you can see the results by clicking the link "Invoice Creation Log Report" link at the bottom. This will provide a list of all invoices that were created, as well as any that were not created for the reasons listed above.
10. To view and/or print the invoices that were created, click the link View/Print Invoices link at the bottom of the screen.

Best Practices in Auto-generating Invoices

• Make sure the Apply Year matches the year you want to recognize the revenue. If you are billing for next year's dues, make the Apply Year to be next year
• It's ok to Auto-Generate Invoices for one Revenue Item at a time, instead of doing it for All Revenue Items at once. One reason for doing this would be if you wanted a different Memo on each batch.
  
• If the resulting batch of invoices has any issues, you can delete the entire batch by going to Revenue > Batch Entry Admin > Delete Batch Entries. Enter the Batch Number you just
  

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This feature is included or available for purchase with the following Atlas packages.