From the Invoice batches form, accessed from the Finance menu, opens the currently displayed batch so you can review, edit and update individual invoices.

It is worth spending some time understanding this window, since it is your opportunity to make sure all is well, and to make any amendments and/or additions.  It is also the place where you can customise the repeating elements of an invoice for individual pupils/fee payers.

Top section
The three boxes show the invoice number, bursary number and Pupil name of the current invoice.  The associated ‘drop-down’ menus enable you to navigate to a particular invoice by picking the relevant information from one of the lists.

 

An alternative (albeit more clumsy way) to navigate through the invoices is to use the navigation tools at the bottom of the window:-

Middle section
Until the invoicing process is complete (signified by the ‘Exported’ radio button being selected) everything in this middle section is editable on an ‘invoice by invoice’ basis.  It is important to note, however, that any changes in this middle section will only affect the current invoice run.  Thus, for example, if you change the address for a particular fee payer, it will NOT change their address in the record in SchoolBase.  Think of it as a way or personalising a particular invoice for a particular fee payer on one particular occasion.

It is also possible to edit the lines of an individual invoice, and to recalculate the resulting total.  These changes are made in the lower section of the window, which shows the lines which will appear on an invoice when printed.

Lower section

Initially, when you first visit an invoice in this way, the lines which appear will be all those which have been added by the system automatically because, earlier in the process, you specified which charges should be automatically added to the invoices of certain types of pupils.  In the example below, this would be the ‘Senior Day Fee’ of £7,682.00, The Adjust Senior Fee of -£2263.00, the Academic Scholarship of -£1,000.00 and the |School Fee Protection of £55.23.

The ‘Type’ column can for all practical purposes be ignored if the correct values were entered when the Finance Codes were created in SchoolBase.  Most accounting systems distinguish between ‘Sales Invoices’ (SI) and ‘Sales Credits’ (SC).  The export routine in SchoolBase will correctly and automatically ‘flag’ transactions whether they were created as a ‘negative amount on a sales invoice’ or a ‘sales credit’.

There will then be a range of charges which need to be added to individual bills for a range of items.  In the example above, the school has levied (amongst others) a £330.00 charge for violin lessons using Finance Code 1405 and a BUPA charge for £57.50.   Both of these are termly repeating charges for this pupil (see ‘Individual repeat items’ below).   Items can either be added individually to a pupil’s invoice, or can be added by means of a ‘Recharge’ as in the case of the Music:Violin charge of £330.00, added to all those pupils who take violin lessons.

All these processes should be seen as different ways of getting charges onto pupils’ invoices.  It is still possible, however, to make individual changes to items even if they were originally added during the fee billing or recharging processes.

For example, as shown below, the standard description for charge code 3550 is 'Library:Admin.penalty charge'.
However, in order to explain them fully to the fee payer, the descriptions have been edited to something more specific: 'Fine for failure to renew library books'.

It is also possible to manually overwrite the amount for an item on an individual invoice.  Remember, this change will apply to this invoice for this pupil on this occasion.  Next invoice run, the original amount from the ‘Pupil type’ fees or finance codes table will be used.

To see the effect of changes to the amounts of the fees on the invoice total, click next to the ‘Value’ box.  The total will also be automatically re-calculated when you move to the next invoice or click the ‘Close’ button
 
Using this button, an individual invoice can be previewed at any time to see what it will look like when printed.

The ‘Copy invoice’ button allows you to produce an exact copy of the current invoice at any time.  It is the same in every detail as the original invoice except that it includes the words ‘Copy Invoice Only’ adjacent to the date and invoice number.
 
Individual repeat items
It is also possible to set an item as a ‘repeating charge’ which will appear on all subsequent invoices for the current pupil until it is ‘turned off’ by removing the tick from the box.
 
The repeat charge is applied the next time an invoice batch is created by looking back at the selected previous batch and adding the ticked invoice lines for all pupils existing in both batches.

NB the value of the charges repeated are taken from the Finance codes table, NOT the values in the previous invoice. This is so that when the charge for an extra-curricular activity changes, it only has to be changed in one place. 

Invoice Audit Trail
Frequently during a financial audit, schools are asked to justify and show the origins of charges added to a random selection of pupils’ bills.  In order to make this process easier, SchoolBase will provide ‘tracking information for every item on every pupils bill.
Firstly, however it was added, every item will automatically display the date it was added.  Items added via the ‘Recharges’ option will also have the Recharge Batch number displayed.  For items added manually, the user can optionally add a reference (alpha-numeric) which refers back to a suitable source document.  Regular items (Fees) do not need a reference since the ‘source documentation’ is either the pupil’s presence in the appropriate part of the school, or a bursary/scholarship list.
 
Update Invoice Addresses
If there is a significant time delay between raising the invoices and sending them out, it may mean that any address changes are not reflected in the invoices. To overcome this problem the button changes ALL addresses for the batch of invoices you are on.  PLEASE NOTE that it does ALL invoices; thus if you have manually changed one for some reason, this manual change will be overwritten if you use this function.  The function is automatically disabled once the invoices have been exported as this will now have recorded where you sent the invoices and should never be changed thereafter.