Overview of Billing in EMS
Billing in EMS is a two-step process:
- Generate Invoices
You can generate invoices based on reservation number, date range, or both. For example, you could generate invoices for all bookings in Reservation 1829 that occurred last month. After you generate the invoices, EMS tracks the amount due and the age of the invoices.
- Process Received Payments
You can use the Payment Entry function to enter deposits made against a reservation before invoicing or booking and to enter adjustments.
As part of this process, you can generate the Billing Worksheet report. (See Generating an EMS Billing Report.) You use this report to review the dollar amounts for the bookings for which you intend to create invoices. You can correct any discrepancies that you note in the report by editing the bookings or booking items in question.
Financial transactions in EMS are batched by department. For example, if a user who is a member of the Scheduling department applies a deposit to a reservation, then the deposit is shown on a confirmation only if the user who applied the deposit or other users in the Scheduling department print the confirmation. If a user in another department, for example, the Catering department, prints the confirmation, then the deposit is not shown on the confirmation. Similarly, invoices that are generated by a department are printed on the Ageing report only if the report is generated for the same department. If you invoice a reservation or one of its bookings, any deposit that was previously made on the reservation is then applied and is no longer shown on the confirmation.
If you invoice an event, the event is locked and cannot be edited. You can edit the event only after you void the invoice. You cannot void an invoice if payments have been made against it. You must first void the payments. You can use an adjustment with a negative dollar amount to clean up your financial records. For example, you generate an invoice for $102 for a group and the group returns a check for $100. If you do not want to ask the group for a $2.00 check, an adjustment of $2.00 balances your books.