Do you ask your customers to pay upfront? Do you then deduct the time spent on that project to ensure your customer doesn't pay too much? Prepaid billing might be your thing!


What

Prepaid billing is a method of paying for services (or goods) before you actually receive them. It allows customers to budget their expenses and keep track of their spending in a more efficient way. Instead of receiving a bill at the end of the month with a list of charges that may come as a surprise, prepaid billing allows customers to set a predefined budget and only be billed for that amount.


How to set up prepaid billing?

  1. On your company/contact detail page, you'll see the section 'Unbilled Time Trackings'
  2. Click on Billing settings in the top right-hand corner
  3. Enable the slider Allow prepaid billing 
  4. Enter the prepaid credits for this contact/company. These credits will then be displayed in this part of the CRM.
  5. Choose if you want to enable 'Automatic invoicing' or not. Automatic invoicing means that Teamleader Focus will automatically generate an invoice as soon as the credits for this contact/company fall below a certain minimum. Note that the invoice will only be generated in the following night.
  6. Once you've set up the credits, you can start tracking time for this customer. More information on time tracking can be found here.
  7. Tracked time will not be deducted automatically, you'll need to select the time trackings by checking the box next to the time trackings you'd like to deduct and choose Deduct prepaid credits

    Note: Can't find the button 'Deduct prepaid credits' anywhere? Simply navigate to Settings > Users and click on the three dots > Edit next to your user name. Then enable the slider next to 'Authorisation for time tracking'.


Prepaid billing report

The customer might ask you for an update on the amount of credits you have been using while you were working on a project. You can easily do this by exporting the prepaid billing report:

  • Go to the customer's page and click on the three dots next to company/contact information > Download report > Export prepaid log. Afterwards you can send this report to your customer. 
  • This report will give you and your customer a clear overview of how many credits have already been used.