Understanding Bills

What is a Bill?

A Bill represents the amount a customer owes for their car subscription or booking. Bills are used to track and collect payments for recurring subscription fees, extra charges, or any other payable items.

In our platform, bills are created in two ways:

1. System-Generated Bills (Automatic Payments)

System-generated bills are created automatically based on the customer’s billing cycle (weekly or monthly). The system calculates the subscription amount and issues the bill on schedule—no manual action required.

2. Manual Bills (No Payments)

These are bills created directly by your team. Manual bills are useful when you need to charge customers for additional items such as extra charger, processing fee, early termination fee and charges separate from  the billing cycle.

There are three types of manual bills that you can raise:

• Immediate Bill (uses Automatic Payment)

A Bill is created immediately and the payment is attempted based on due date and time set on the bill.

• Scheduled Bill (uses Automatic Payments)

A bill is created with a future bill issue date. The Bill is issued on that day and the customer is  charged, on the due date.

• No Payment Bill

A bill is created without triggering any automatic payment.

We’ll cover these billing options in more detail in upcoming articles.

Types of Dates during Bill Creation

When creating a bill, it’s important to understand the three types of dates involved:

1. Created date: the date the bill is created on the system.
2. Invoice date: the date the bill is issued to the customer. This is especially relevant for Scheduled Bills, which are issued on a future date.
3. Due date: the date the payment is attempted. Setting a due date gives customers time to ensure sufficient funds are available.

For an Immediate Bill, the Created Date and Invoice Date are the same.

For a Scheduled Bill the bill entry may be created today but issued on a future invoice date.

Types and Statuses on Bills

Bill Types

Bills in the system are of various types

1. Initial Bill

The First bill that is automatically raised by the system after the customer signs the booking contract.

2. Recurring Bill

A bill that is automatically generated for a booking at each billing cycle.

3. Additional Bill

A manually created bill raised by a user for one-off charges.

Immediate, Scheduled, and No Payment bills fall under this category

4. Account Bill

A manually created bill that allows you to charge a customer directly without linking the bill to a specific booking.

Bill Statuses

Bills in the system can have one of the following five statuses, depending on where they are in the billing and payment process

1. Draft

Bills in the Draft status include Scheduled & No Payment bills

Draft bills do not have an invoice number until the Invoice date and time is reached.

2. Unpaid:

Bills are marked as Unpaid when:

a. payment has not been attempted, or

b. a previous payment attempt has failed

3. Transaction processing:

When a bill reaches its due date, its status changes from Unpaid to Transaction Processing. At this stage, the system sends a payment request to the customer’s payment provider.

The associated payment entry will show a Processing status until a response is received.

Based on the response:

a. The bill is marked Paid if the payment is successful

b. The bill reverts to Unpaid if the payment fails

While a bill is in Transaction Processing status, no actions can be performed until the status updates.

4. Partially paid:

Bills that have been partially paid by the customer are marked as Partially Paid.

5. Paid

Bills that been fully paid by the customer are marked as Paid.

More details on how bill and payment statuses work together will be covered in a separate article

Accessing Bills on TJ Ops

To view bills, navigate to the Finance module from the left-hand menu and click Bills.

Here, you can view bills charged across all customers and bookings.

Article by Roshel Jose

Please note:

1. The JRNY platform is constantly evolving and new features and functionalities are added all the time. We are constantly updating the Knowledge Base, but some instructions and/or images you see in these articles may vary slightly from what you can see in your own environment. Get in touch with support@tomorrowsjourney.co.uk when in doubt.
2. Some features and functionalities may require configurations or additional development to work in your environment. Please speak to us if you have any questions.