Rents account invoice management overview

For those housing organisations which generate a significant number of invoices, the Account Invoicing functionality helps to streamline many of the repetitive billing tasks, therefore ensuring that end-to-end processes are highly organised, accurate and encourage prompt payment. Delivered through a complementary Account Invoices Home pane, the finance controller can also track individual invoiced amounts, associated due dates, status progression indicators and their overdue timeline (in days). In general, any professional invoice must comprise a unique invoice number, details of the chargeable service provided, the date of issue and also the date on which the service was rendered, as well as the costs breakdown, total amount due, payment details and payment due date. To facilitate this, the generation of invoices integrates fully with the well-established Communication Engine, enabling end users to customise their invoice format through the creation of a communication template.

Housing organisations are able to generate their own invoices directly from within Civica Cx Housing for a range of different scenarios, including: (1) To capture those repairs being recharged back to a tenant; (2) To capture those repairs being recharged back to a landlord under the terms of a Private Sector Leasing (PSL) scheme; (3) Consolidating rent and sundry charges incurred by a tenant over a defined period, focusing only on those accounts that are identified as 'invoice based'. The categorisation of invoices is reflected through the general lookup parameter - Account Invoice Type - which forms part of the core header information for each new invoice entry and allows end users to navigate easily between the different records. As a prerequisite to invoice creation, a reference number convention must exist for the corresponding entity - Account Invoice - ensuring that each invoice is assigned its own incremental and standardised value. Through the definition of a robust and future-proof sequence generator, the resulting reference can be configured to mirror legacy data and integrate seamlessly with third party system protocols e.g. those maintained within financial accounting packages.

Separate help articles have been created for each key aspect of rents account invoice management, including:

• To define a custom account invoice status code
• To link a communication definition to an account invoice status code
• To define a variable account invoice payment period
• To raise a new account invoice
• To add detail lines to an account invoice
• To link an existing payment to an account invoice
• To define a reference number syntax