How do I invoice reservations per month?

The situation: reservations must be paid by invoice and it is desirable not to send an invoice directly per reservation, but one invoice per month.
This is usually the situation if the person making a reservation does so several times a month. For example, in the case of renting a meeting room, but this can also be the case when booking a sports lesson. This usually concerns regular customers who do not want to be billed per month but per month.

How do you approach this?

Firstly, a draft invoice must be made for each reservation. Basically there is a one-to-one relationship between reservation and draft invoice.
We can achieve this in several ways.
1. we enable the setting "create a draft invoice at status XX". Then set XX to, for example, 90 and let the reservations close automatically. In this case, a reservation that takes place, for example, on January 10 at 12-3 p.m. will be closed on January 10 at 3 p.m. When closing (set to status 90), a draft invoice is automatically created.
2. the manager creates the draft invoices in one go at the end of the month. Create a status "91-INVOICE" (or something similar that is easy to recognize). Set the setting "create a draft invoice at status XX" to 91. Create a filter with all reservations from the past month.
Now perform a bulk action and set all those invoices to status 91. There is now a draft invoice for all selected reservations.

In both methods there is now a list of draft invoices.

Secondly, the list must be compressed per customer. After all, we want a customer to receive one invoice per month and not per reservation.
To do this, go to Invoice > Merge Invoice. Select the option "By customer ID".
A list of draft invoices appears. One or more invoices can appear per customer.
Continue the bulk action. This may take several minutes.

The result of step 2 is a list of draft invoices. Only now there is no longer a 1-on-1 relationship with the reservations. But a 1 on 1 with customers. At least for those customers who have been active in the past month.

We are now ready for step three. The list of draft invoices must now be finalized.
To do this, go to Invoice > Finalize invoice.

The result of step 3 is that all monthly invoices have been sent and the customer has received an invoice with an overview of various reservations.

Comments

• This description assumes a configured invoice module. First ensure that matters such as invoice templates have been set up and, in the case of an accounting link, that ledgers have been specified for all prices. Check also: how do I check invoices?
• This process can be supplemented with checks on the reservations. For example, on catering (options list).
• Special attention may also be paid to recurring reservations. If a reservation consists of a weekly recurrence pattern, 4 or 5 lines may need to be invoiced. This is called partial invoicing. Can be done per reservation or create detailed reservations. Then you can still follow the description in this article.