Recurring invoices are a convenient way to automate the process of billing a client on a regular schedule. You can set a recurring invoice to be generated automatically at a specific interval and sent to your client via email. This feature is useful for businesses that have regular clients and bill them on a regular schedule, such as monthly or annually. It saves time and effort by automating the invoice creation process.
When configuring a Recurring invoice, you have a variety of options of how AutoBilling can be enabled. There are 4 options:
When set to Off it means that the recurring invoice will never be auto-billed.
When set to Enabled it means that the recurring invoice will always be auto-billed if a valid payment method is on file.
When set to Enabled by default - a radio checkbox will appear during the payment process. This checkbox will allow the user to opt in or opt out from auto-billing. With this particular setting, the radio button will be pre-selected to ENABLED auto-billing.
When set to Disabled by default - a radio checkbox will appear during the payment process. This checkbox will allow the user to opt in or opt out from auto-billing. With this particular setting, the radio button will be pre-selected to DISABLE auto-billing.
To make your life easier, we've put together few reserved keywords in the line items description to make your work with recurring invoices, much easier.
Reserved keywords are:
As you may guess, each time invoice (PDF) is generated, keywords will be replaced with actual value, so:
:MONTH, :YEAR, :QUARTER :MONTHYEAR keywords also support basic mathematical operations: addition, subtraction, multiplication & ** division**.
So this is the pattern for mathematical operations:
%KEYWORD% %OPERATION% %VALUE%
Let's see it in practice. Imagine you're sending an invoice for a gym membership every three months. Write this in item description & let's see what we get:
Gym membership: :MONTH to :MONTH+3
... and let's save & preview the invoice:
Nice! Now, each time you send this invoice, you don't have to put the exact month, nor the upcoming month.
Month: :MONTH
Year: :YEAR
Quarter: :QUARTER
:MONTH (+, -, *, /) e.g. :MONTH+1 :MONTH-1 :MONTH*2 :MONTH/2
:YEAR (+, -) :YEAR+1 :YEAR-1
:QUARTER (+, -) :QUARTER+1 :QUARTER-1
:MONTHYEAR (+, -) :MONTHYEAR :MONTHYEAR+1
Previously listed keywords are super cool, but what if we have to generate for example:
Gym membership: February 2021 to February 2023
It's easy as typing following:
Gym membership: [MONTHYEAR|MONTHYEAR+24]
Gym membership: February 2021 to February 2023 🎉
Another way to do it this:
Gym membership: :MONTH :YEAR to :MONTH :YEAR+2
Keep in mind that [MONTHYEAR|MONTHYEAR] syntax will take care of overlapping dates.
[MONTHYEAR|MONTHYEAR +, -], [MONTHYEAR|MONTHYEAR+16], [MONTHYEAR|MONTHYEAR-2]
As you can see [MONTHYEAR|MONTHYEAR] uses "to" between date ranges. This is not hard coded, but it builds itself based on your localization settings.
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