Credits or discounts on invoices

G'day SammyG​ !

Welcome to team Solo! We're stoked to have you on board 🥳

I can confirm that discounts are on the way! I don't have an exact timeline yet, but they shouldn't be too far off. 

Until then, there's a few ways to go about this, depending on the situation. For example, are you wanting to just give a general discount, or are these situations where a customer perhaps overpaid and you want to reflect that on their next invoice? If it's a general discount, then reducing the item price and making a note in the item description or note section is generally the way to go. 

The more info I have on the different scenarios where you'd need credits or discounts, the better advice I can give 😄

Hi and thanks for the reply,

I'm a piano teacher and charge by the lesson so sometimes need to be able to credit lessons in the next payment period if I was unable to deliver a lesson due to illness etc.

Also, I need to be able to itemise a credit for specific amounts due to a government voucher program in my state that gives parents $100 vouchers to use towards various extra curricular activities. I feel like it’s quite messy and confusing for parents if I have to represent the number of lessons they are being charged for in that term, plus the voucher reduction all in one item. 

Thanks for the detail, that helps heaps! I'll give you the current way of doing this from Solo, but once discounts are live it will make this a lot simpler! 

Unable to deliver lesson/Overpayment

Let's say a parent has pre-paid 4 lessons for the month, each one is $50, for total of $200. However, you were unable to deliver one lesson, and you'd like to apply $50 to next months invoice. The current way to go about this is to use your CASH account:

Step 1 Refund the full $200 from the original invoice to your CASH account (sometimes referred to as a contra account - think of this like your Solo piggy bank, you can use it to move money around when needed).

Step 2 Create a new invoice for $150. Add a quick note to your customer explaining that the original invoice has been reduced to $150 for services provided, and the remaining $50 will be credited towards their next invoice.

Step 3 Record a $150 payment for this new invoice to the CASH account. Don’t forget to email the updated invoice to your customer!

Step 4 Create a fresh new invoice for future services of $200.

Step 5 Apply the remaining $50 (from that earlier refund) as a payment to this new $200 invoice, again using the CASH account. The invoice will only show $150 due. Email this new invoice to your customer too.

Applying $100 Voucher

I might need a little more info here, what is your current process for these vouchers? Do the parents supply the voucher to you, you discount their invoice, and then collect the voucher value from the government separately?

Thanks for the instructions on the work around. To be honest, it’s a lot of extra time and work to do something that previously took me 10 seconds by entering in a negative amount as a credit for undelivered lessons on the following term’s invoice. 🫠

For the vouchers, the parents fill in a form and submit it to me. I then submit their details on a government website and invoice the parent a reduced amount. I am reimbursed for the voucher amount by the government department a week or 2 later.

I totally hear ya on the current set-up not being ideal, but I promise discounts are very close to being live (we're talking days or a few weeks if everything runs smoothly), Once they are live it will be super easy to simply mark a lesson as 100% discount on the next invoice. 

Now I've got the full picture for the vouchers, the simplest way to do this until discounts are live is to essentially reduce the invoice amount for the parents, for example by editing the item price to subtract $100, or you can even save it as an item with it already subtracted. You can include a note saying something along the lines of "$100 government voucher already subtracted from total". Once we've got discounts up and running, this should be a bit simpler as well. 

Then when the government reimbursement hits your account, you can categorise that accordingly within Solo. If you’re using Connected Accounts or a Solo Money bank account, Solo’s smart matching will start to recognise how you categorise these and suggest the same category next time.

Hope this helps in the meantime while we wait for discounts to land, but let me know if there's anything else I can help you out with or clarify! 

Hi SammyG​ 

Line item discounts are now LIVE! Make sure to update your app to version 7.6 and give it a whirl. You can see more on discounts here, as well as info on the other cool features in this version. 

It's thanks to Solmates like you that Solo keeps getting better and betters, so keep the ideas and feedback coming!