Why HaloPSA calls them recurring invoices when they are really templates

Connor: I must have a conversation every single week with a new prospect that tells me that their invoicing is messy, it takes too much time, they're losing too much revenue because of mis-licensed agreements. They have no idea what their P&L is, they kind of know a little bit but they're so confused. And HaloPSA can take a lot of that away. Now it's not going to fix billing overnight, it's not going to make it all hands-free, however we can start getting there iteratively and slowly improving our process to make your life a little bit easier.

So today I'm going to show you all the mechanisms involved in HaloPSA, how to set them up, what they mean, what they do, and hopefully provide some value to yourself.

My name is Connor Fagan, we are Renada Solutions and we provide elegant solutions to technical problems. We do provide consultation, virtual admin and VCT type services to MSPs all around the world. But today we are explicitly focusing in on HaloPSA and recurring invoices.

So let's jump into Halo. So in Halo, if you click on the left-hand side you have invoices and you will see on the left here you have recurring invoices. But you might also say, say Connor, I also have customers and when I click on a customer I go to the tab here that also says recurring invoices. And if I have an agreement and I go over to an agreement there's also a tab in here recurring invoices.

So what's the difference? It's all the same, doesn't really matter where you make it. The only caveat being if you make it from an agreement it will automatically be attached to that agreement, whereas if you make it anywhere else you will have to manually attach it. That's the only difference, don't get stressed about that.

So I'm just going to go into recurring invoices and click new and then click recurring invoice in the top right. And I like to call these recurring invoice templates. That's kind of the name I've coined for these because these are what generate each month and this is the template, it creates an invoice from. So it doesn't directly invoice this, it kind of copies the data and makes an invoice from it. So these are your recurring invoice templates. I think Halo should rename it to that. Let's start a petition.

So I'm going to click new recurring invoice and I'm just going to start from top to bottom, go through some of the settings and then we're going to go into adding all the line items, what all of the different settings mean, and hopefully by the end of this video you will be a recurring invoice master.

So I'm just going to start with Batley Refreshments. You can pick a site, so if you have a client with multiple sites and you want to generate an invoice per site you can do that by selecting a site. Alternatively you can leave it as all or leave it as blank and don't select a site. The option is yours.

As I mentioned a minute ago we have this agreement option where if you want to tie it to an agreement then you can do that. The benefits of that being is let's say we have a managed service agreement, let's say we have a leased line agreement and let's say we have I don't know a security agreement if you provide a SOC service or something, you can tie a recurring invoice to an agreement and then I can report on how profitable the agreement is based on how much time is logged or caught against the agreement, how much revenue the recurring invoice attached to it is making, what the burden rate of your staff doing the work is against that type of agreement. Again, recurring invoice and it can all just be absolute data heaven.

But let's start simple, let's not select an agreement today, we'll get there. Address, I'm going to leave blank, don't care about that.

Schedule. You then need to define when you want this recurring invoice to be made or when you want to create the recurring invoice. So what I'm just going to say is I want this invoice to start on the 1st of June, okay? Now this is the period, the invoice period, okay? So this could either be current period, so the 1st of June to the 1st of July, the next period, so on the 1st of June you could make it for the 1st of July to the end of July, or the previous period, so you could make it on the 1st of June for the entirety of May. That's what this start date is.

Then you have your repeat period. So this could be monthly, quarterly, annually, whatever your heart desires. The end date, this is the date when it won't be made anymore, so if you want it to end, I don't know, we're only going to invoice them for two months, June and July, and then it ends on the 31st of July, you know, you could do that.

Number of days ahead of schedule to create. So what some people do is they like to create their invoices a few days before the first of the month, so you could say I don't know 5 days before the 1st of June I want to be able to create or I wanted to auto-create this recurring invoice 5 days before.

Create on holidays. This basically says if your organisation in Halo has holidays set, do you still want it to create and send the invoice if you do automatic recurring invoices?

And active basically says is it active yes or no? If it's not active it won't be able to be created.

And then the last creation date, every month this runs you can always go back in here, check the schedule and see when it last ran.

And then just go ahead and press save. Now for the longest of times in HaloPSA this filter doesn't work very well. What I mean by that is if I click current period and save, it will then update the creation period to be the 1st of June to the 30th of June. However if I change this to be no days ahead and press, let me do the 1st of July, see if I can break this on video, 1st of July, save and then press save, yeah, you'll see it's now for some reason done the dates all out of line.

And what you got to do is filter it back and forward again and it sorts the dates out. As far as I know that is a UI bug. It will actually work correctly, but this has never worked. I've told Halo several times but they, it's bottom of the list I guess.

So basically that's what that's doing, it's showing you when you can create the invoice, so on the 1st of July in this case, and what period is making it for. You can put the period as the previous month, so we can do June or the next period being August. I'm just going to say current period.

Then you can set a due date. You can set this globally so all recurring invoices do have the same recurring invoice due date. If not you can override it on here. You could do a net 30, right? And then you can select a few things. Do you want it to be 30 days after? Do you want it 30 days after the end of the invoice month, so if you invoice in the middle of June, did you want to have a net 30 for 30 days at the end of June? Following month or of the current month?

Currency. If you are multi-currency you can select what currency this invoice goes out in. Also if you do have the currency set per customer it will default this currency when you select the customer. Again, always keep an eye on that.

A setting that was introduced I don't know when, but is really really cool is invoice separately. Let's say you have five different recurring invoices and you want this one not to be grouped with the others, you can click this little checkbox.

And all of these settings down here only apply, as far as I understand, if you're automatically creating the invoice. And what this says is if it automatically creates on the 1st of June also pull all of these things onto this recurring invoice, so it could be any additional sales orders you're not invoiced for yet, any travel time, any items issued, to have one master recurring invoice. Which some people like.

I'm in the camp of make your recurring invoices manually each month. You've got you know just a quick set of eyes over it. If one says a quid or it says three bucks or it says a million dollars you can catch that visibly before it's automatically made and sent to your client. But that's on you.

And you can also enable a minimum invoice total. I don't know why you'd ever do this but you can do it if you want.

Reference and notes. Depending on the integration you have with your accounts tool these will work differently. Reference I believe will appear in Xero and in QuickBooks, maybe in the reference field. And note is what is shown on the recurring invoice page.

Example if you will. Example if you will, see what I did there. And then reference when I press save and then go to recurring invoices you will see the note here, example if you will. And what's good about that is I can then type in example and it will find that recurring invoice.

This is how we work because we have monthly and annual recurring invoices for licences and for our consultation services. So we just jump in here and I just filter to have a quick glance at you know what we're selling. Typically though I'd run it from reports.

And that's it. That is basically the foundation. The last thing to know is the PDF template. You can set this globally so you can select this is always this recurring invoice template. If not you can override it on a recurring invoice.

And also you've got this automatic increase. So you can say I want to yearly increase this entire recurring invoice by 10%.

And that is actually it for the side settings. Just going to press save, it's going to scream at me and say you have no invoice lines, you silly goose. I know, I know.

And then I want to run through the few settings at the top. So first of all you've got change history. This is really really valuable by the way. So if you are updating, reducing, adding, removing lines on your recurring invoice you have the change history in here. Then you can add notes to it as well. These can be leveraged on the template if you want. I've never really used these, not really found a value yet as far as I'm aware. But they can be either rich text or just plain fields.

And then attachments. You can attach things to this recurring invoice if you wanted to.

Should we get into the meat of it then shall we? So when you're building out these recurring invoices you can add a recurring product, you can add a product. The difference being very little to be honest, because this will generate monthly, so it doesn't matter if it's a recurring item or not.

The benefit of a recurring item, which I'll demonstrate in a minute, is the fact we can bulk update all of our recurring invoices from a product and increase or decrease the price.

I strongly recommend never using generic product because it won't link to an item in the product catalogue which will probably mean it won't link to the chart of accounts correctly in your accounting tool and it will probably just cause a bunch of headaches.

You can add a product bundle. So if you do, here's some of our packages. If you do have a bulk of things you can add it in here. And you can also create a new group. And this is just the way it looks on here. You could have managed service products and list them all out and you could have backup and list all that out and do whatever you like. The world is your oyster.

So let's get into adding some recurring items shall we? I have two crap ones here. Again, these are set in my system as recurring, just ignore the names. Let's just do laptop setup fee and I'm just going to rename this for this video to be Microsoft Business Premium. There we go.

Long description. You could just make this a little bit more long. Monthly, month to month, whatever, right?

If you do decide to start making groups you can select here, put this in this group, put this in this group, and it means it can look pretty on your invoice.

I'm not going to go through meter invoicing today, we'll leave that for another session.

Quantity. This is really the secret source to Halo in my opinion. So we can say that this line item quantity is driven by something automatically. Now that can be one of four things. That can be based on the licence count at the client, this can be the user count at the client, this can be the asset count at the client, and the subscription count.

So let's just start from top to bottom and let's go through licence first of all. So if I say I want the quantity of this to be driven by the number of licences I can then press add and what this will show us in here is all of the licences available and you can even say only include assigned licences in the calculations.

Well what do we mean by that? First of all, well if you have the CSP integration set up with Microsoft you will notice that under your software licences you will have in here all of the licences that that tenant has, how many they have, who they're assigned to, and if they're available or not.

So this is my dev tenant and I have 25 E5 developer licences. I know we're fancy. And it was saying here that they are assigned to these people. If you watched my last video you'll see my good friend Alex Wilbur in here.

So what we can say is yes I want to base it on the number of E5 licences they've got and since we're buying them all I want to invoice for that. So I can go back to my recurring invoice and you will see that the quantity, example if you will.

Let me add in here, laptop setup fee again. Let me type in here Microsoft Business Premium. I'm going to save it this time I swear. And you could say here yep, all business premium licences. Fantastic. Save, save, save, and then that will update to two because Batley Refreshments under software licences only has two business licences and they're assigned to Robbie and Aiden.

Jumping back into that line item, we could actually say well the problem with licences is Connor, we take on new clients and they've got grandfathered in licences because they did a yearly commit for another vendor. Licence isn't particularly tangible for us because it's you know it's never maintained correctly.

So I'm like okay fine, I get it. So then we focus on subscriptions. Now subscription count is what comes from your distributors, so Pax8, Ingram Micro, etc. And again we have the same mechanism in here. So we can say I want to build a quantity based on a subscription at the client level. However, just remember that subscriptions aren't assigned to users. This is just an integer, so it'll just be 10, 20, whatever.

You can say um actually as a part of our service we give them five free licences because we're insane. And what we see often quite a lot is a minimum quantity. So let's say if you're breaching that point in MSP where you're only taking on 10 or more staff, but a client really really wants you, you could commit to a sell contract based on a minimum user count of 10. And again you can define that here. That way if their staff leave they're still tied into that 10 user or 10 subscription in this case.

Quantity. Then we can do user account. Again I try and stay clear with this one if I can, just because we all know engineers like myself will make test users and we don't always understand the implication of billing if we do that. But if you are really really clean and tidy with your user list then we can use users. And again in this one here we can select the site, we can select the user, if they have a licence assigned.

So this is quite powerful. Let's say you do billing for full users and light users, right? Let's say they've only got Exchange Online Plan 1 or something, right? And you could say we bill a full manage service at £1 per month if they have a business premium licence. If they have anything else or an Exchange Online Plan 1 then we only bill them £2 per month to manage their mailbox.

So again we can leverage the licence assigned to the user on something completely different. We could do this. So all users with business premium get our gold package, right? And then you can do that.

So when I press save and save, that quantity will now be two apparently. It'd be zero. What do you know? Um, business premium, all sites, fine. And the reason that is zero, it's because this is my test build and it's all over the goddamn place with data and somehow we managed to break it here. But these users are actually not even at this site. These are at Renada and contoso and I'm looking at Batley Refreshments.

Yours will never get like this. We like to break things. But the idea being is that we can leverage those user accounts based on the licences. There's the problem demoing in a build we trash daily.

But just to recap, we can say all the users that have a business premium licence at that client. By the way, so either at all their sites or at a certain site. And again we can do quantity free or minimum quantity. Just remember though that we can also select criteria.

So we could say I don't know the job title is equal to, they get charged a premium because why not, okay?

Lastly we can use assets. Now assets is quite an interesting one because you can do asset groups, you can do asset types, and you can do sites and you can also do criteria. We often leverage this with domain names. So if you're an MSP that does sell a lot of domains to your clients and you get them roughly for the same price or you sell them at the same price, you could leverage all domains at the client site. And then if they go up or down in domains you're still invoicing out correctly.

And again we have quantity free and minimum quantity. If you're wondering what asset group means, if we go over to assets you will see asset groups on the left. And if you want to make a new one, simply right-click one, create a new group, typing new asset group, press save. And then when you go back to your recurring invoice edit this, you will now have them asset groups.

So again, if you do have a really tidy asset database and you do build based on assets you can again leverage a multitude of things to build your assets correctly.

Also don't forget as well when we're talking about subscriptions is you can bundle multiple subscriptions into this. So let's say you bill for like a gold and a silver package or gold and a bronze package based on what their job is. You could say that this includes anyone with business premium, E3, E5 and the bronze package could be anyone with Exchange Online Plan 1, business standard, etc., etc.

Which is really valuable. That is basically that for adding the quantities. The last thing to note which I haven't covered yet is how you do the pro-rating or pro-rater in the UK.

So there's four options in here. We have, or five. So the first one is include changes in the next invoice. Let's say you sell a licence at £30 a month and there's 30 days in the month to keep the math simple, doesn't matter what day I add this in the month, it's going to bill for the entire month at that price. So if it's 30 quid it will bill for £30.

If you had it on the first day of the month or on the day before the last day, it's going to bill £30. Pro-rated from the date the change occurred, which is the default by the way, and is what we typically see everywhere. Is if I had a licence on the 15th, for the month and there's 15 days remaining, I'm going to bill £15 or $15 for the remaining 15 days. This is typically what we see because our distributors will invoice us the same.

Going down you can exclude the changes. So if you add a licence or use a middle of the month you won't bill until the next month.

You can immediately invoice for changes. So if you do have a monthly recurring invoice or annual recurring invoice and you add something to it you could immediately invoice out. However, this does pro-rate it. So it will be created for the difference between when it was originally made versus now. So if it was I don't know a year and you invoiced out £120, you add it middle of the year, it will invoice £60 out till the next renewal.

And this new one which is fantastic is pro-rate any changes and add this to the ready for invoice section for billing separately from the recurring invoice. What this means is if you sell an annual licence, now let's say you've got a new client on and they buy five business premium licences and you add one three months in. The only option you had before was invoice them immediately for the change, which was really annoying for people because you know you might do three in a month and they've got three separate invoices and you can't control it or even edit it. It's just made the invoice.

Whereas now it goes to ready for invoicing so you can now see the additional pro-raters. I've been chatting with Halo a lot about getting headed in because I've had a few clients now with nuances and stuff like that, War, and I'm looking at you particularly. I'll link you this video when it's out but this really enables us now to do them yearly recurring invoices increase licences automatically based on

users going up or down and then showing it in the ready for invoicing section which means when we do our monthly billing run we can do them all in one and invoice for all of the changes per client as opposed to spamming them invoices throughout that period which is fantastic. Save track costs only. Um, I still need to chat with Halo about this one. This basically says it doesn't show a price on the invoice. It only tracks your cost. Um, it was called bundled items, I think in some language packs it still is bundled items. Essentially it makes it a zero line item and you can decide if you want to or not show it to your clients but the idea being it is that we're tracking the costs and this is for profitability.

Um, I've always made a group called bundled items and in there I've just not set a price. This removes or negates the ability to have to do that. However, there was some problems of it not following through to the posted invoice so I will update you all on that at a later date. Um, price and cost pretty straightforward. The price we're selling it at, the cost it's costing us to buy it. Um, tax code that's fairly straightforward. Discount, if you're discounting it, and then this is all related to your accounts integration.

PR, this will show us any PR editions in that period. Automatic increase, so like the recurring invoice we can do an automatic increase here on an individual item, so every year put up our manage service by 10%. Status, I'm not going to focus on that too much now. Um, you can do one time charges but I recommend against it because it gets complicated and if the line item is aced or not. Review allows you to review it. It will show under recurring invoices and the review required section. I don't love this functionality honestly but if you want it you can, and then attachments again at the bottom for that particular product and that is a wrap.

You'll see with that track costs only again in Halo's infinite wisdom if I click track cost only it will say bundled is yes. Um, they need to update some wording in my opinion but the idea being is is that we can link a line item on a recurring invoice to many many many things in Halo. Some of the value we provide when working with Renada is the fact we really dive into the weeds of this to try and understand the best data set for the line item and try and have any a ubiquitous front for all of our clients. How do we build? What is it based upon? What do we need to make sure we're reporting on to keep accurate? Um, what's the most stable data set? Is it subscriptions? Is it assets? Is it users? What are we better at keeping up to date? Um, and really getting into the weeds of that.

Um, but hopefully this video helps you. There's a lot of moving pieces here and the last thing I will add is if you go to configuration, billing and recurring invoices, some of the things I mentioned earlier about um we can control the default period here. Um, we can go to billing general settings and invoice creation. We can set a global due date. So I said earlier you can manually override it to thirty days. We can set a global due date here. Um, there's a lot of things. Really, there's a lot lot more to billing but I would just thought I would give you today a high level overview in the weeds if you will of how to build a recurring invoice.

Um, any questions put them below. I'll try and get to them as soon as we can. Um, I hope you've enjoyed this video. It has been a long one. If you stayed to the end you're an absolute legend. As always, I've been Connor Fagan. Have a beautiful day, keep safe and we'll see you soon. Bye-bye.