Consolidated Monthly Invoicing

What consolidated monthly invoicing does

Normally every payment produces its own final invoice: a renewal is paid, an invoice is issued; a client tops up their balance, another invoice is issued; a new order is paid, a third invoice is issued. A client with ten services can easily receive twenty fiscal documents a month, and every one of them has to be posted by an accountant.

With Consolidated Monthly Invoicing switched on, payment is still collected the moment it is due — nothing about cash timing changes — but it is collected on the proforma, which is not a fiscal document. The proforma is marked Paid and left standing. Shortly after the calendar month ends, the platform issues one invoice per client carrying every line of every proforma that client settled during that month.

The result is one fiscal document per client per month instead of one per payment, with the full detail preserved: each line on the monthly invoice names the proforma it came from and the date that proforma was paid.

Note: This article describes the arrangement in operational terms only. Invoicing rules differ by country and change often. Confirm the arrangement with your own accountant before you switch it on.

Before you can turn it on

Your company must issue proformas

Consolidated invoicing only exists on top of proformas. In Invoice (Direct) mode the document the customer pays is the fiscal document, so there is nothing non-fiscal to accumulate on and nothing to defer.

Open Settings → Billing. In the Billing Document Type card, set Default Document Type to Proforma First and save. Until you do, the consolidation switch below is greyed out and an amber notice explains why:

“Cannot be enabled: consolidated invoicing requires the Billing Document Type above to be set to Proforma. Switch to Proforma and save first. In Invoice mode the payable document is already the fiscal one, so there is nothing to defer.”

The gate works in both directions. Once consolidation is on, you cannot switch the document type back to Invoice (Direct) in a separate step — the save is refused with “The Billing Document Type cannot be changed away from Proforma while consolidated monthly invoicing is enabled. Turn consolidation off first.” Turn consolidation off, save, then change the document type. (Changing the dropdown to Invoice (Direct) in the panel switches consolidation off for you in the same edit.)

See Billing Settings for what the two document-type modes change elsewhere.

Your company’s country must permit it

Whether this way of invoicing is allowed at all is decided by the country your own company is established in — the country recorded in your company details — not by where each customer lives. Two things have to be true there: a periodic summary document has to be permitted instead of one document per transaction, and receiving money before the service is supplied must not trigger its own immediate document.

The platform checks your company country against a reviewed list and shows the verdict directly under the switch:

• Permitted — no notice appears, and the arrangement runs.
• Not permitted — a red notice appears: “Consolidated invoicing is INACTIVE: it cannot comply with the invoicing rules of your company country, so it refuses to run rather than issuing every invoice late or in the wrong form.” The specific national rule is quoted underneath it. Nothing is deferred while this notice is showing, whatever the switch says.
• Not reviewed — an amber notice appears: “Your company country has not been checked against this billing model. It is not blocked, but roughly half of the non-EU countries reviewed do NOT permit a monthly consolidated invoice over prepaid amounts — confirm with your accountant before enabling.” The feature will run, but nobody has verified it for you.

A permanent note beside the issue-day field adds a jurisdiction reminder about customers in a small number of countries where a following-month issue day is not valid. Read it before enabling, and raise both the company-country verdict and that note with your accountant.

The two hard limits

Two constraints are built in because they come from invoicing law rather than from preference:

• One calendar month, never more. A consolidated document may only cover a single calendar month. Every document the platform issues covers exactly one month and says so.
• Issued within a few days of month end. The issue day can be set anywhere from 1 to 10 days after the month closes, and no higher. Saving a larger number is refused outright with “Consolidated invoicing close-out day must be between 1 and 10. The cap is the invoice-issuance deadline for advance payments, not a preference.” In countries with a tighter national deadline the effective ceiling is lower still, and the platform applies the lower of the two.

Turning it on

In Settings → Billing, find the Consolidated Monthly Invoicing card and switch it on. Four more controls appear.

Consolidated Monthly Invoicing controls

Field	What it does
Consolidated Monthly Invoicing	The main switch. Off by default. Inert until the billing document type is Proforma First.
Include credit top-ups	On by default. Folds add-funds payments into the same monthly invoice instead of issuing one invoice per top-up. Clients still receive their credit the instant the top-up is paid.
Include new orders and upgrades	On by default. Folds first orders and upgrades into the same monthly invoice instead of issuing one per purchase. Provisioning and the upgrade itself still run the moment the proforma is paid. Wholesale (reseller) orders are included. Turn this off if some of your buyers insist on a fiscal invoice in hand at purchase time — renewals and top-ups keep consolidating.
Issue day	Day of the following month on which the closing invoice is issued. Default 5, range 1–10.

Two read-only notes sit between the controls: one explains how refunds behave in both directions, the other is the jurisdiction reminder described above.

Save the Billing settings page as usual. The change takes effect for payments made from that moment on.

Rehearsing it first

At the bottom of the card are two buttons:

• Preview this month — groups exactly the documents a real close-out would group and reports the result without writing anything: “N invoice(s) would be issued, covering M paid proforma(s).” This is the safe way to see what the arrangement does to your document count before any fiscal number is used.
• Close previous month now — runs the close-out immediately instead of waiting for the issue day. It issues real invoices with real numbers. A confirmation appears reading “N invoice(s) issued, covering M proforma(s)”, and the run is written to the Activity Log.

Tip: Run Preview this month before you enable anything, and again a day or two before your first real close-out. It reads the same data the real run does, so a surprising number here is a surprise you get to investigate before it becomes a fiscal document.

Exactly what folds onto the month’s document

These payments are settled on the proforma and wait for the month’s invoice:

• Service renewals — always, whenever consolidation is on.
• Credit top-ups — when Include credit top-ups is on. The balance is still granted immediately; only the paperwork waits.
• New orders and upgrades, including wholesale orders placed by resellers — when Include new orders and upgrades is on. Services are still provisioned and upgrades still execute at the moment of payment.
• Manual proformas an administrator raised by hand that are not tied to an order or a service.

These never fold, and keep producing their own invoice at the moment of payment:

• A renewal that is on hold behind an upgrade. It is not payable until the upgrade releases it; once released it behaves as an ordinary renewal and folds.
• Every other document type the platform issues keeps its own per-purchase invoice.
• Anything settled as a refund rather than a payment. Refund paperwork has to point at a fiscal document, so a real invoice is produced.
• Part-payments. Only a document that becomes fully paid is settled in place. A partly paid proforma stays Unpaid until the balance arrives.

How a credit top-up interacts with the month’s document

A top-up is the case the arrangement was built for, because on most installations top-ups are a large share of the month’s documents. With Include credit top-ups on:

• The client pays the top-up proforma and their credit balance rises immediately. Nothing about crediting the balance waits for month end.
• No separate top-up invoice is issued. The top-up’s lines join the client’s monthly invoice.
• Top-ups are normally issued free of VAT while the same client’s renewals carry their own rate. Rather than splitting the client into two documents, the VAT-free top-up lines are folded onto the client’s VAT-bearing monthly invoice and marked as non-taxable lines. The invoice total is the sum of what the client was actually charged, line by line.
• If a top-up is refunded, the credit it granted is reversed — whether the refund lands before the monthly invoice exists or after it. A refund is never left with the client keeping both the money and the balance.
• A payment refunded in full before month end cancels its proforma, so money that was handed back is never invoiced at all.

See Credit Balance for how the balance itself works.

The month, day by day

When a client’s document opens

There is no button that opens a month. A client’s month begins the first time they settle a proforma inside it. From then until the close-out, every further payment they make simply joins the same collection. A client who pays nothing in a month gets no document for that month.

When it closes

The close-out runs as part of the daily automated billing tasks, last among the billing steps so that nothing belonging to the month it is closing can still be in flight. It runs on the configured Issue day of the following month — and on any later day too, so a day the platform was unavailable is caught up rather than skipped.

The close-out drains every month that still owes a document, not only the one just ended, and buckets each payment into the month it actually landed in. A straggler from two months ago therefore receives its own invoice for that month rather than being folded into the current one.

For each client, currency and VAT treatment it issues one invoice and then:

• marks every covered proforma Converted and points it at the new invoice;
• moves the payments that settled those proformas onto the invoice, so the money follows the fiscal document;
• links any add-on options and wholesale orders that were bought on those proformas to the invoice;
• emails the client a dedicated notification naming the period, the amount and every line.

What the monthly invoice looks like

• It appears in Invoices & Proformas with the description Monthly Invoice followed by the month and year, and on Invoice Details it carries a Monthly Invoice type badge.
• Its status is Paid — the money was collected during the month.
• It is dated the day it was issued, and it states the period it covers.
• Every line of every covered proforma is copied across in settlement order, each prefixed with the source proforma number and the date that proforma was paid, so a line can be reconciled without opening anything else.

How documents are grouped

One invoice per client per month is the goal, but three things can legitimately split a client into more than one document for the same month:

• Two currencies. Payments in different currencies never merge.
• Two different VAT rates. One invoice header cannot state two rates, so a client whose rate changed mid-month receives one document per rate. A rate of zero is the exception described above: it folds in as non-taxable lines.
• Two months. A document may never cover more than one calendar month.

A second document for a month already closed

If a payment lands with a date inside a month that has already been closed — a late-settled document, or a period reopened by hand — the next close-out issues a supplementary invoice for that month rather than ignoring the money or attaching it to the wrong period. This is legitimate, but it is a second fiscal document for a closed month, so tell your accountant when it happens rather than letting them find it.

What you may and may not do while a document is still collecting

Between the moment a proforma is settled and the moment its monthly invoice is issued, that proforma is the only record of a payment you have already taken. The platform protects it accordingly.

Allowed and refused actions on a settled, not-yet-invoiced proforma

Action	Result
Change its status by hand	Refused. “Proforma number is settled and awaiting its consolidated monthly invoice. Its status cannot be changed by hand — delete its payment to reopen it, or refund the payment to cancel it.”
Cancel it	Refused, with the same message. Cancelling by hand would drop collected money out of the close-out.
Delete it	Refused. “Proforma number was settled under consolidated invoicing and is the record of a collected payment. Delete its payment instead (which reopens it), or refund the payment.”
Delete its payment	Allowed. The proforma returns to Unpaid and drops out of the close-out. Use this when a payment was recorded in error.
Refund the payment in full	Allowed. The proforma is cancelled, so no invoice is ever issued for money that was returned. A refunded top-up also has its credit reversed.
Refund the payment in part	Allowed. The proforma stays settled — the remainder is still owed its invoice — and only the refunded share of a top-up’s credit is reversed.
Edit its notes, due date, lines or VAT	Allowed, but treat it with care: the monthly invoice is built from these documents, so anything you change before the close-out is what the fiscal document will carry.

Correcting a monthly invoice after it is issued

A monthly invoice cannot be converted back into a proforma; the attempt is refused with “A consolidated monthly invoice cannot be converted back to a proforma. Delete it instead — its proformas return to the month-end sweep and are re-issued.”

Deleting one is the supported correction. Deleting a monthly invoice hands its proformas back to the close-out and detaches (rather than destroys) the payments that settled them, so the next run re-issues the document with a fresh number. Because a fiscal number is consumed either way, agree the correction with your accountant first.

What the client sees

During the month

In Invoices & Payments in the client portal, each proforma they have paid appears in the documents list with the status Paid. They can open it and download it exactly as before. What they do not yet have is an invoice for that payment — the fiscal document arrives after the month ends. If your customers expect an invoice per purchase, say so before you switch this on.

After the close-out

The covered proformas move to Converted and drop out of the client’s document list, replaced by a single Monthly Invoice for the period. Opening it shows every line, each labelled with the proforma it came from and the date it was paid, so the client can reconcile the month themselves. They also receive an email announcing the monthly invoice with the period, the total and the itemised lines — not the standard “new invoice” message, because there is nothing left to pay.

Turning it off mid-month

Switching Consolidated Monthly Invoicing off takes effect immediately for new payments: from that moment, a paid proforma converts to its own invoice at the moment of payment, exactly as it did before.

Everything already settled in place keeps its arrangement. The close-out is deliberately not tied to the switch, so proformas that were settled while it was on are still swept and still receive their monthly invoice for the month the money landed in. Switching off therefore never strands collected money without a fiscal document — the part-month simply closes out as a smaller document than it would have been.

The same is true of the two sub-switches. Turning Include credit top-ups or Include new orders and upgrades off stops new payments of that kind from deferring; ones already settled still get their monthly document.

Common questions

Does the customer pay later?

No. Cash timing is unchanged. Payment is collected when it was always collected; only the fiscal document is deferred.

Does provisioning wait for month end?

No. Services are provisioned, upgrades execute, credit is granted and hourly services keep running the moment the proforma is paid.

Will a client on hourly billing get two documents?

Hourly usage is charged against the credit balance rather than against a document, and it is summarised on its own monthly document. Consolidated invoicing does not change that; it changes the top-ups that fund the balance and the renewals of the client’s other services.

Related articles

• Billing Settings — the page every control on this article lives on.
• Proforma Details — the document payments are collected on.
• Invoice Details — where a monthly invoice is opened and read.
• Credit Balance — top-ups, spending and refunds to balance.
• Invoices & Proformas — the ledger both document types appear in.
• Invoice Export — getting the month’s documents out for accounting.