Billing is a system for tracking financial relationships with a client, including various types of financial documents. This seemingly quirky set of terms and their relationships is absolutely essential for your business's financial system to run reliably and for the balance to always be reconcilable. The time spent understanding it is the best investment 😎. We are even proud of this system — try evaluating it yourself.

Billing includes:

• Payments — top up the client's balance;
• Invoices — an accounting document certifying the fact that services were provided and their cost;
• Refunds — sometimes money has to be returned;
• Transfers — sometimes someone asks to transfer the remaining balance to another client;
• Charges — close invoices from the balance;
• Cash registers — record cash transactions;
• Prices — determine the cost of programs;
• Discounts — make pricing more flexible.

Balance 🔮

The billing system works very similarly to the billing of mobile operators. At the center of the system is the client's balance. We top it up with payments, which can be made in various ways: via bank, cash register, ERIP, and other payment systems. Then funds are charged from the client's balance for services. Each service separately charges the required amount from the balance.

In our system, based on the programs the client is enrolled in, invoices (bills) are issued with open status. If there are sufficient funds on the client's balance, funds are charged from the balance and the corresponding invoices are closed. The balance decreases by the amount of the closed invoices.

If there is not enough money on the balance, it can be topped up with a payment or a transfer from another client. Regardless of which branches and which programs the client attends, they have one balance.

What makes billing convenient

• Invoices for programs can be issued automatically.
• The system tries daily to close open invoices as soon as there are sufficient funds on the balance.
• Prices are configured per program: per period, per lesson, or per lesson package.
• Discounts can be static or dynamic, percentage-based or absolute.
• If a client has several discounts, the system selects the most advantageous one.
• Prices and discounts are applied at the moment the invoice is issued, but the amount can be adjusted manually.
• Erroneous payments, refunds, and transfers are corrected with offsetting documents, and an incorrect closed invoice — via a correction.

The billing design covers all possible variants of financial interaction with the client while remaining fairly transparent and structured. No matter what happens, it can always be figured out.

You can learn more about the structure and capabilities of billing in Gulliver CRM from the article Billing.

P.s. 🧩🏆

Billing is needed to track financial relationships with a client. It is organized around interconnected financial documents — payments, invoices, refunds, transfers, charges, cash registers, prices, and discounts — and makes settlements with clients clear, controllable, and flexible.