In a recent post Emiel Romein explained the process of creating invoices for subscriptions, see Turning subscriptions into money. In this post I am going to explain the process of creating the invoices in more detail and give you some tips that may help you in using the functions more efficiently.

As Emiel already showed you, the process of invoicing subscriptions only contains a couple of steps. You create some subscriptions and then go to the Generate invoices function in the subscriptions menu. In this screen you will see a list of subscriptions that can be invoiced. Select the subscriptions you want to invoice and press the Generate button. The generated invoices are now available for final printing and processing.

The subscriptions you see in the Generate invoices screen are filtered based on the values in the filter section in the top of the screen. There are several filters available, but two of them are important for showing the subscriptions that need to be invoiced.

The Invoiced up to and including field in the subscription holds the date up to which the subscription is invoiced. So the corresponding filter in the screen controls which subscriptions are shown in the screen based on the date they need to be invoiced again. The second important filter is the Not yet invoiced filter, checking this filter will result in showing all invoices that have never been invoiced (and therefore have an empty Invoiced up to and including date in the subscription).

Some tips to make working with the Generate invoices function easier

• The invoice date in the screen is default set to the current date, however it can be changed if you want to. Keep in mind though that this date is only for planning the invoices, the actual invoice date is determined at the moment the invoices are printed.
• You can enter a general description for the invoices, but it is not mandatory. If you do not enter a description, the description from the subscription is copied to the invoice.
• The administration settings (subscription page) has a useful setting that will allow you to automatically add a number of days to the Invoiced up to and including date filter. So if you want to see all the subscriptions that need to be invoiced in the next 5 days, enter 5 in the setting.

• Different subscriptions for the same customer that are processed at the same time will be grouped together in one invoice. If the customer wants to have separate invoices you can disable the grouping in the customer’s account card.
• After you generated the invoices there is a confirmation message in the top of your screen. This message also contains a link to the Print invoices function, so you can go to printing the invoices in one click.

The invoice is not correct, can I still change it?

It can happen that you have generated invoices for a number of subscriptions, but when you check the invoices before printing you notice one or more are not correct. Maybe the customer has more subscriptions that need to be invoiced or something in the subscription is not correct. At this point you can still correct this by deleting the invoice. This will cause the Invoiced up to and until date in the original subscription to be reset to the value prior to generating the invoice. So you can make adjustments to the subscription and generate the invoice again.

If you already printed the invoice and you or the customer notices it is incorrect, you can only correct the invoice by creating a credit note. This credit note will be linked to the subscription. If you need to create a new invoice you will have to do that by manually entering it in the invoice solution, it cannot be generated from the subscription solution.

When do you send the invoice?

In the last months I have had meetings with a number of customers that use the subscription solution in Exact Online. One of the things I noticed is that quite a number of customers sent the invoices in advance of the subscription period. Although it is not something you can indicate in the subscription itself you can manage this when generating the invoices. You need to change the Start or Invoiced up to and until date filters to look further in the future.

I hope the above information will make using Exact Online a little easier for you. As always let me know if you have questions or remarks by leaving a comment.

Exact online now offers a selection of advanced cockpits. Next to the improved Financial cockpit, cockpits for Customers, Sales, Purchase, Time & Billing and Payroll are now also available. The one’s you’ll be able to access will depend on the license you have. The help files for each cockpit can give you detailed information on the summaries displayed within them – simply click on ‘?’ in the top right corner of the screen.

A cockpit will give you insight and direction into your day to day work and your most important processes. What needs to be done, what is there to check, what’s happening in your business processes, key financial information and historical overviews.

The new styled cockpits were introduced in the blog New year! A nice moment to give our cockpits a new facelift! by Ilja Udo.

Also available and maybe of great help to you is the ‘My cockpit’ screen. This offers the possibility to create a cockpit according to your own wishes, showing information about the businesses processes most relevant to you.  All webparts available in the defined cockpits can be inserted here and positioned as you see fit.

Try it out and see what advantages it can offer you. And keep in mind that the ‘My cockpit’ has a standard layout that can always be set back using the ‘Default’ button.

How do I customize the My cockpit?

At the right top of the screen click on the ‘customize’ hyperlink.

Webparts can be selected in the webpart catalog. You can open the catalog by clicking the + in the zone you want to add the webpart to. You can change a webpart’s position using drag and drop.

One of the improved webparts is the ‘To Do’. In defined cockpits this To Do webpart shows a shortlist of to-do’s and alerts for specific area of the business. For example, the Financial cockpit shows only financial to-do’s.  In the ‘My cockpit’ this webpart can be customized to show an optimal list for all the areas of the business most relevant to you!

How do I customize the To Do webpart?

If this webpart is not visible in your cockpit you can add it using the Default button to retrieve the updated template, or select it in the webpart catalog.

Go to the ‘To Do’ webpart and in the right top corner click on the edit hyperlink.

Properties will be displayed. Changing these properties changes the list that will be visible to you. If you go to the property ‘Group’, multiple checkboxes are displayed. Mark all the areas of the business that are relevant for you and save the webpart.

Following this the To Do webpart will display the relevant to do’s and alerts that you have chosen to be informed about!

For our Dutch Exact Online customers we have just adjusted the layout of the ‘Help startpage’. With the one aim to make the page better usable by offering you less options in a more clear way. Attention grabber is hopefully a big search field where you can type the keywords for the matter you need help with.

There was one change we got upfront some feedback on; the search field doesn’t come with a ‘Go’ or ‘Search’ button. Just an enter after your keywords will do. Although we got this feedback during our internal reviews we feel confident about the clarity of the search box itself. We think the appropriate action to fire the search (hitting the enter key on your keyboard) is obvious and so we could even make the page more clean. What could you do more than hitting enter on your keyboard after you put in your query?

The new help start page offers you:

• the mentioned search box
• a list of at the moment frequently asked questions
• a quick link to the guidance we offer for different processes
• options to contact us for a question, by phone an to chat instantly
• a way to retrieve your earlier communication with Exact

We certainly hope you find now easier what you are looking for, when you miss something just let us know via a reply to this post.

You may already know that we developed a new way to get started in Exact Online. Marco Kastrop wrote about it in his February post Get set, Ready…GO!. He explained there how we learned from the logistic pilot customers that we needed to improve the ‘Getting Started’-process. And we did!

You can access the new subscription Getting Started in both the Panel menu and the new Tab menu, but because I’m only going to show you how to access the Getting Started in the Tab menu, I’ll first explain how to switch to the new Exact Online menu style.

Robert Huberts wrote about the new menu last October in the post Introducing a new menu style for Exact Online. I’ll keep it short and just show you the menu style option.

1. Click the User settings link in the bottom-left of your screen.
2. Change the Menu style option from Panel to Tab menu.
3. Click Save to save the change you’ve made.

* You can easily switch back. In the new style click the General tab and click User setting. It’s in the bottom-right of the General tab.

When you change to the new menu style you can open the subscription Getting Started by clicking Sales tab > Getting Started > Subscriptions (bottom-left).

Congratulations! You’ve made it to the Subscription Getting Started -our new starting point to learn about the subscription functionality, set-up the system and even use the functionality on a daily basis, if you want.

There is a process flow visible that explains the way subscriptions works. Clicking an icon in the flow will guide you to that specific process in Exact Online. Clicking the Invoice generation icon – for example – will open the invoice generation page. Clicking the Invoice process icon will open a more specific Getting Started page where the invoice process is explained.

Furthermore, you have links on the right of the screen to the Customers cockpit and help files. Typing a question in the search box brings you answers from the range of available help documents.

In the top-left of the screen is the link Make this my startpage. If you click this link, this page will open when you start Exact Online. You can change the startpage (or homepage) again in the User settings.

Of course, it is still possible to use the subscription menu to access all the subscriptions functionality. Simply click Sales tab > Subscriptions > Show all.

I hope that with this guided start, you will enjoy a great new experience working with subscriptions!

Recently Robert Huberts posted an article about how to setup prices for subscriptions. Before that I showed you how to create a subscription and subscription types in only 4 easy steps. It’s time to make it interesting and generate those important invoices!

Let’s say I’m a small household appliance maintenance guy. I have several services I offer my customer and one of them being basic maintenance (work on any household product that needs a periodic cleaning or check-up).

So I’ve setup a type for the basic maintenance subscription I want to offer. I called it Basic and it’s a subscription of two years after which it will automatically continue. Customers can cancel any time after the two years.

Great news! I’ve already got 3 customers who have subscribed for my basic maintenance services. As such I’ve created three subscriptions in Exact Online. My first customer is Femke van der Brinkhoven from Amsterdam. She gets my Basic 24/7 stand-by service and the basic cleaning of any household appliance for only €7, 90 per month incl. VAT.

The other two subscriptions are for John van Bergen-Dalen and Jack van Dijk. But these last two subscriptions are different because they will not be invoiced to the people who get my services. Both will be invoiced to Marco de Graaff – the employer of John and Jack.

Now that I have sold and created my first subscriptions I’m very keen on actually invoicing my customers. So I go to Generate invoices in Exact Online and I quickly see all subscriptions that can be invoiced, as you can see in the screenshot below.

Now comes the really exciting part! Check all subscriptions you want to invoice (I can select all lines via the one checkbox in the lines header) and click the Generate invoices button.

There I go! I have just created my first subscription invoices! In this case I created two invoices. One for Femke and one for Marco. The subscriptions of John and Jack are – by default – combined to one invoice because it’s sent to one person. If I want I can always overwrite this setting on Marco’s account card so that he receives one invoice per subscription.

Finally I can print or send the invoices. I just go to Print invoices in Exact Online. Select all generated invoices with one click and press the Print button. In the case shown below I will see a preview of the invoices. If I choose Final in the print options the invoices will be finalized. I’ll also get extra output options like: sending the invoice by e-mail, Digital Postbox or according to the account settings which could be a mixture of all options.

So to summarize, the invoicing of subscriptions basically involves two steps:

1. Open the Generate invoices page, select all subscriptions and press the Generate invoices button.
2. Open the Print invoices page, select all generated invoices, choose to test (trail) or finalize and press the Print button.

By keeping the software simple and easy I finally have the time to actually do maintenance instead of spending hours and hours behind my computer!

In June 2010 we have announced the availability of logistic functionality in controlled release for Exact Online.  In this period customers can get acquainted with the functionality and provide us useful feedback during visits, round table sessions or via support.

One of the things that we have learned from the feedback is about the ‘Getting started’-process. How to get started once you have extended your license with new functionality? Is new data required to get started? What is the basic process flow of the new functionality? Over the last months we therefore have researched of how we can better facilitate your first experience with the (new) functionality.

The direction of the new Getting started experience has been in the hands of our user experience team. A team dedicated to studying, analyzing, implementing concepts whereby the user takes the central position. Per functional area we have there fore defined a getting started page that will allow you to navigate throught the main steps of a process flow. We are still fine tuning the pages and are currently evaluating the usability of the pages with users, but I would like to show you an example of the purchase process flow that is displayed on the getting started page of logistics:

Click on the image to show full size

As you can see, you can (hopefully) recognize the basic steps in a logistics purchase process. The flow is interactive, when hovering over the flow you will be able to start the selected process or find help documentation related to selected topic.

Next to the process flow and the main settings required to start with basic process of the respective functionality, you also have direct access to other main sources of help (like e.g. our help start page or other related information).

I hope that with this guided start, you will have a great experience working with our software.

In previous blog “New year! A nice moment to give our cockpits a new facelift!”  the new structure of all Exact Online cockpits was described. The School cockpit has however been given an entirely new look.

What is new and what has been changed?

1. An Entry web part has been added;
2. A To do web part has been added. Existing web parts ‘To Do Bron’ and ‘Per registration date’ have been incorporated in this new webpart;
3. Existing web parts ‘Cultural background’ and ‘Gender’ have been moved to the middle section of the cockpit;
4. The GTB web part has been added;
5. Existing web part ‘Student starting list’ has been moved to right side of the cockpit.

This all resulted in the new School cockpit appearing as follows:

Entry web part

The entry web parts offers shortcuts to the following functions:

• Overview students
• Overview groups
• Overview employees
• PGN exchange menu
• Entry of absence
• Overview of fixed tests
• Overview of own tests

To Do web part

For School the following To Do’s are shown when applicable:

• Students to be registered
  This To do shows the number of students for which data has been changed after the last exchange of student data with PGN. The number of new registered students that have never been exchanged before are also shown.
• Feedback to be requested
  This To Do shows the number of students for which data has been sent to PGN but for whom no feedback has yet been received in return.
• Feedback to be processed
  This To Do shows the number of students for which feedback has been received from PGN but has not yet been processed.

The To Do web part can also show the following Alerts:

• End of school year procedure
  This alerts shows between the 1^st of June and the 31^st of July the number of groups for which the end-of-school-year procedure must be executed
• Parent meetings
  This alert shows the number of planned parent meetings
• Birthday
  This alert shows the number of students that celebrate their birthday in the current week
• Activities*
  This alerts shows all future school activities between today and 1 month ahead.
  *Each occurring activity is shown separately by it’s own name.

Cultural background web part

This pie expresses the cultural backgrounds of all students.

Gender web part

The pie shows the percentage of students that are male or female. The percentage of undefined students is also shown.

GTB web part

In this overview  a school can find the number of students that count for regular funding. The GTB overview shows different matrices for WPO schools and WEC schools.
The matrix for WPO schools has the following subsections:

• Funded students
• New weight

The matrix for WEC schools has the following subsections:

• Funded student
• Ambulatory accompaniment

Student starting list web part

This list shows the number of students that start at the school this week.

We hope that for schools this cockpit fulfills the multiple cockpit goals mentioned in “New year! A nice moment to give our cockpits a new facelift!”   Questions, remarks or suggestions are always welcome. Please let us know!

A whole range of new solutions was developed and introduced across Exact Online  in 2010. Per function group Exact Online offers a cockpit. As the new solutions were added, more cockpits became available. In order to show consistency and clarity throughout the product, we decided to initiate a project to align them and ensure they all carry the same look and feel. As such we’ve been busy giving them a facelift in time for the new release. I’d like to share some of our changes with you here.

A cockpit is designed with multiple goals in mind:
• to give quick access to main processes;
• to give the user insight into the daily progress of work;
• to keep the user up-to-date – the user is alerted to news or other new entered data;
• to remind the user of things that need to be done;
• to  present management with periodic numbers of performance. 

To further support the aforementioned principles the improved cockpits should all: 

1. Apply the same structure;
2. Follow the same alignment.

Structure 

Each cockpit has thus been designed with the following structure: 

The Entry section offers you shortcuts to the most used functions: 

The above financial Entry section allows you to quickly enter various journal entries – easy access to your main processes. 

Completed entries must then be followed up. The To Do section shows all occurring To Do’s and Alerts.  

To do’s show what needs to be followed up. Everything awaiting manual action (by the user) anywhere in the process should be shown here.
Alerts are signals you want to present to the user. Signals do not require immediate action. They can function as reminder that something is on hold or is waiting for action from a 3^rd party. The To Do section, in addition to keeping you up to date and well informed, gives you starting points for your daily work.  

The results of completed work are expressed on the right side of a cockpit.
The Summary section shows totalized numbers of executed processes. 

The above figure shows what has been created at the purchase department during the last seven days – important information necessary for maintaining insight into ongoing work activities. 

So called Lists complement the overview of the current state of affairs. Here a relevant top X list is shown. You can think of the top 5 best selling customers or the top 10 of items that represent the highest purchase volumes. A list of accounts split up per type is also possible. 

The middle section of a cockpit is used to express key decision information in graphical format. The graphs don’t just show totalized numbers but can also be used to compare data - offering support to users when analysing their figures. 

The above graph compares the different sales stadia – a clear and concise way to present empowering performance data.
  

Alignment 

Per report type we implemented the same style and we gave the cockpits the same look-and-feel. 

The goal of the facelift is to enhance the readability and usefulness of each cockpit. To stay in line with the structure a new report occasionally had to be created. We hope that the new set up and the currently offered reports provide the daily information you need to empower and facilitate you in your work. In case you have any further suggestions, please let us now!

In one of the previous posts called A new member for the Exact Online family, Robert Huberts introduced our new Subscription functionality. He explained that the new subscription module is meant for companies that offer goods or services based on a contract that is periodically both invoiced and renewed. He also mentioned that the subscription module can only be used together with the Exact Online Invoice module due to integration between the Subscription module and the invoicing functionality. He wrote about subscription types (to define the length of a subscription period and the invoicing frequency within it) and he mentioned the three ways to handle the renewal of a subscription – no renewal, automatic renewal and manual renewal.

So let’s have a first glance at the creation of a subscription. We tried to keep it as simple and clear as possible by only showing the fields that are absolutely necessary to create one. Some additional fields are hidden, like the discount and net price fields in the lines, and can be added by clicking the customize link in the upper right corner.

1. The first thing you need to enter is the customer for who you are creating the subscription – the subscriber. This is the person who is buying your service or product. If the invoice needs to be sent elsewhere, you can select an alternative customer for the Invoice to field. If you don’t the field is automatically filled with the subscriber as well.

2. The next step is defining a subscription type. First click on the icon on the right of the Subscription field. If you created a new administration there are already three types that you can choose from. If not, click the New button and create a new subscription type.

Here you can create a new type. Enter a code and description. This can be anything you want. You could make an item / product specific type or you could make a more general one.

For example: If you sell two different magazines you could create one type for both magazines (items) or you could create two separate types – one type per item. It’s up to you to decide what fits you best, but I recommend a type per service or item. I defined a type for a magazine I’m selling called Super Cars. It’s a 1 year subscription after which it will be prolonged for another year. There is a cancellation period of 2 months within the first year and 1 month after that.

After you have saved the new type you can select when creating new subscriptions in the future.

3. The next step is to add the service or product you are selling to the subscription lines in the Create: Subscription page. In my example this is the Super Cars magazine. The unit price of the subscription is €29,99 incl. 6% VAT.

4. To finish up click the Save button. Congratulations! You have just created your first subscription! From the subscription card you can edit the subscription to make changes, print a subscription confirmation for the subscriber or even cancel the subscription – all with the click of a button.

In the next blogs we’ll come back to subscriptions and write about printing subscriptions, generating and printing invoices, renewing subscriptions and updating item prices in all active subscriptions.

Remember that you can only use or add the subscription functionality to you license if you have the invoice functionality as well. If you do not use Exact Online yet, you can select the subscription functionality when you choose the Exact Online Premium subscription.

Now that this module is generally available I am very interested in your opinion of it. Please let me know in the comments. Thank you!