Introduction

Occasionally you may need to invoice your clients on a recurring basis, for example to cover an ongoing subscription or licence fee. QuickFile provides the ability to set up an invoice template that is used to schedule further invoices to be send to your clients on a fixed weekly, monthly, or yearly interval. Once set up, recurring invoices are send automatically from your account without you having to do anything further.

Creating a new recurring invoice profile

All future invoices are referenced from a master profile. You can set up a new recurring invoice profile by following the ‘Recurring invoices’ link in the Dashboard’s ‘Sales’ menu:

Next, clicking the ‘Create’ button:

The recurring invoice profile screen looks much like the standard invoice screen with a few additions. In the top right hand corner you can set the start date, frequency and the number of invoices you wish to be dispatched.

Dynamic Variables

When designing your recurring invoice template you can use a number of dynamic variables to embed time related information into the invoices. Let’s say you want to invoice your client for a monthly magazine subscription. Rather than entering the description “Monthly Subscription Fee”, you could enter “||MONTH|| Subscription Fee**”. This would effectively replace the token “||MONTH||” with the current month e.g. “July Subscription Fee”. You can also manipulate the token by adding or subtracting months within the token. For example “||MONTH-1||” would display the month previous to this month.

Sandbox

If you’re looking to try out some variables but don’t want to wait for the invoice to be triggered, take a look at our custom date variable test tool.

Recurring invoice variable test tool

More Examples

There are a handful of other tokens you can use to display time-related content. Take a look at the following examples:

Annual Service Charge for ||YEAR+1|| = Annual Service Charge for 2020

Printing Charges for ||MONTH|| = Printing Charges for October

||QTR|| Subscription to Law Gazette = Q4 Subscription to Law Gazette

Subscription ||DATE|| to ||DATE+3M+1D|| = Subscription 01/01/2020 to 02/04/2020

Hosting to ||MONTHEND|| = Hosting to {whatever the last day of the month is}

Saving and Activating your Profile

When you are finished editing your template you can save or preview the template.

Once you have saved you will see a preview of the invoice, any dynamic variables will be highlighted in yellow:

When you click on the activate button your profile will be automatically included in our scheduling system.

Auto-collect payments by direct debit (powered by GoCardless)

QuickFile is fully integrated with GoCardless.com allowing you to automatically collect payments on recurring invoices using the direct debit system. You can find out more about how GoCardless.com works with QuickFile from the link below.

Collecting Payments with GoCardless

Send preference

Any invoices seeded from your profile will be sent to your client based on their preferences. For each client you can set a default method for how they will receive invoices from your company, by post or by e-mail. Don’t forget to set this accordingly for any client you are sending recurring invoices to.

Pausing and deleting active profiles

You can come back to your recurring profile any time you like and pause or delete it completely. You can achieve this from the recurring invoice preview screen.

Setup your invoices for manual approval

If you have a client for which your invoices may vary from one month to the next, or you would simply prefer to manually approve an invoice before it is sent then you can enable “Manual Approval” mode. This option will appear in the recurring invoice preview screen under the “More Options” menu.

Once enabled any invoices created from that template will remain in Draft status and we will email you (the account admin) to review and approve. Emails relating to recurring invoices that are pending review are sent at approximately 3pm each day.

Once approved the invoice will be sent to the client in accordance with your sending preferences configured on the recurring invoice template. If the invoice is set to auto-bill via GoCardless this payment will also be automatically initiated once the invoice is approved.

Recurring invoice profile history

For each recurring invoice profile in your account you can navigate to the preview screen to see a history of all new invoices seeded from the profile. This can be found in the lower portion of the screen, in the recent events area.