Invoices to your end-customers
We have again reworked our whole process of invoicing end-customers, and significantly optimised it. From now onwards, invoices will be even better adapted to your own accounting needs. It is very important to us at bookingkit that you are set up in the best possible way to keep your accounts - this is why we have discussed the new invoicing system intensively with our tax advisors, and in this article would like to explain our new and improved method of handling invoices:
New: Payment instruction
Optimised invoice logic
Improved: Cancellations
Something worth knowing
Do you have any further questions on billing? Then please follow these steps!
Payment instruction
The most important bit first: from now onwards, your end-customers will no longer receive a pdf-invoice attached to their confirmation email, but a payment instruction. In principle, this is the same as the end-customer invoice which we have previously sent you. So it contains all the important information such as methods of payment, payment status and payment date. The payment instruction is not an official document. The invoice alone serves this important purpose, and this will of course still be available to yourselves and your customers. You can naturally download the payment instruction securely from the order detail in your bookingkit account.
And here is a sample payment instruction:
Invoices
Your end-customers can continue to download invoices from the Summary of services. This is available to you, as usual, on the order detail view in the back-end. What is new, is that as soon as you amend an item in the order, for instance by adding an additional participant, and then the invoice is opened for the first time again by your end-customer or yourself, a new invoice is created. As part of the new invoice, a new invoice number is of course also created. If, for instance, RN4-VNFAUX was the old invoice number, the new one will be called: RN4-VNFAUX-1. In the Summary of services, the respective current invoice will always be available to your customer. In accordance with the principles of correct accounting, you always have access in the back-end to all invoices ever made out.What is also new is that methods of payment, as well as the payment status and date are no longer shown on the invoice. These are shown on the payment instruction.
Cancellations
Cancellations and refunds are doubtless part of your everyday business transactions, and there are, as you know, various options for cancellations and refunds in bookingkit. So how exactly will this be affected by our new invoicing system?
Cancellation of the whole order: if you cancel a whole order, your end-customer receives a cancellation invoice in the cancellation confirmation. As the provider of the service, this is naturally also available to you in your bookingkit account under Orders > Cancelled orders:
Partial cancellation of an order If you only cancel individual participants in an order, but the order continues to exist in bookingkit, your end-customer will receive a corresponding, newrevised invoice.
Refunds: If you also arrange for a refund, for instance a cash refund or a voucher refund, your customer will receive a credit note for the stated value in addition to the cancellation invoice or the new invoice.Here is an example of a credit note:
Cancelling an order already paid for without a refund: If you get an order which is paid for in situ, you can of course mark it as paid. For orders which are paid for online, the money is transferred automatically to your trustee account. As soon as a payment is marked as paid, money has changed hands. If you cancel without a refund - so you are not refunding the money received in any form - this will appear as a “booking fee” on the invoice, in accordance with the principles of proper accounting. You still have the money, of course, and were paid by the customer, so this also has to be properly shown on the invoice.
Something worth knowing
For orders with Payment against invoice and Reservations, no payment instruction is sent. To ensure that we can correctly enter both these cases in the accounts, invoices have to be sent.
As usual, your customer will of course receive all the necessary information to settle the outstanding items, such as IBAN, purpose of payment etc. Your customer can of course download the invoice and all other relevant information at any time from the Summary of services.