The Billing module in PYLI is designed to keep track of who owes money to your organization. You can have as many accounts as needed to track this information.
Once your billing accounts are set up, there are 3 ways to modify the balance of those accounts: Bills, Credits, and Adjustments.
Bills are positive amounts which increase the amount due by the member, Credits are negative amounts which decrease the amount due by the member, and adjustments can be either. A negative balance on an account means the member has surplus funds, while a positive amount is due by the member.
Manually add Transactions
To start, visit the account you want to add a transaction to, and click the Add Transaction button located on the top:
Add a Bill
A bill is a line item in a billing account that a member will be required to pay to make their account current. A bill will always have a due date in addition to memo & detail information. What you put in the Memo and Detail boxes is up to you, however it's best to try to be consistent with whatever you decide. Members will see both of those details when looking at their account statements or transactions in addition to the due date and amount. The date field accepts most ISO formats, and is flexible enough to make assumptions for missing information. If you don't include a year, it will assume the current year.
Once added, that will appear like this in the account ledger:
To avoid confusion, account ledger transactions are not editable. If you make a mistake, you will need to delete the transaction and add a new one. For PYLI Pro customers it's worth noting that deleted transactions will automatically appear in any audit reports so you can verify deletion was permitted.
The line item for a bill will dynamically show how much of the bill is still required to be paid by the due date, and if the bill is past due. For example, if a member makes a check payment of $50, PYLI will know that they still have $200 to go on that particular bill:
Here is an example of a past due bill that was partially paid:
Add a Credit
A credit is the opposite of a bill, but it does not require a due date. A credit can be used when a member pays an admin in person outside of PYLI (e.g. check/cash) or it can be used to offset any expense within the account.
Adding one works similarly to bills above:
Any amount entered here will offset the amount a member owes to the organization. It will appear in the ledger like this:
Add an Adjustment
Adjustments are meant for quick administrative fixes to an account balance.
Adjustments do not have due dates, and will not be accounted for in past due member balance numbers or reports like bills. It's better in most cases to use a bill or a credit, but adjustments are here to help administrators get to a specific balance. Adding one can be done just like credits or bills, with the exception that a negative amount lowers the members due balance while a positive one increases it:
As you can see in this example, adjustments will offset the amount due on a bill, however if you are adding something the member needs to pay in the future it's better to use a bill with a due date:
Bulk Transactions & Billing
There may occasionally be times you need to add bills or credits to a large list of people. With PYLI, you can use Bulk Billing to accomplish this quickly without having to enter every single account one at a time to add a bill.
You can find the controls for Bulk Billing under Admin > Billing & Finance > Bulk Transactions
Creating a new bulk transaction works very similarly to creating a manual transaction at first:
You start by selecting the type of bill, then move on to who it applies to. Don't worry if you make a mistake, unlike traditional manual transactions these can also always be edited.
Once you create a bulk bill, you will be taken to the screen to edit the details of it:
Here you can add the user accounts you'd like to bill:
Once the user accounts have been added, their respective accounts will show the bill/credit/adjustment. You can open each account if you want to see the results by clicking on the account ID.
In situations where you find yourself needing to bill the same or similar people repeatedly, you can use the Copy Bulk Transaction function:
This will allow you to make changes to the transaction information while retaining the same billing accounts:
Once copied, you can then modify the billing accounts if needed.