How billing works

Once an agreement is signed and its client and items are linked, the contract page offers Send to QuickBooks. You get a full preview of what will be created before anything is written — read it, because it is the moment to catch a mistake cheaply.

Up to two kinds of thing, depending on what was sold:

• An invoice — the one-time charges, plus the first period of anything that recurs.
• A recurring template — one for monthly charges, one for annual, starting at the second period since the first is already on the invoice. Each carries the date it stops.

Nothing is emailed to your client. You review and send from QuickBooks.

This follows the term you set on the quote, which printed on the agreement the client signed. It is not re-decided here.

• As it runs — the invoice covers the opening period, and recurring templates carry the rest of the term.
• In full up front — every period of the term is on the one invoice, and no recurring template is created at all. There is nothing left to repeat.

This is the rule the rest of the design exists to protect. A recurring template with no end date bills forever, and nobody ever notices money leaving on a schedule they agreed to years ago.

So: a quote with recurring charges cannot be saved without a term, the end date is worked out from the start date and that term, and it is written onto the QuickBooks template as the last day it may bill. The preview tells you the end date and exactly how many invoices the template will raise before it stops.

If an agreement started a month or two before it reached QuickBooks, those periods have not been billed by anything. HootQuill puts them on the opening invoice and says so plainly — it will tell you it is billing, say, three periods of Managed IT up front.

Sales tax is calculated by QuickBooks from its own settings, not by HootQuill — so a total in your books may differ from the one shown here. That is correct: your books are where tax is decided.

Settings→Integrations→QuickBooks has a check that compares every recurring template against the agreement that created it, and reports anything that no longer lines up:

• Still billing a finished agreement — the agreement ended but the template is still scheduled. This one costs your client money.
• Missing — the template is gone from QuickBooks, so nothing is billing a live agreement. This one costs you money.
• Switched off — the agreement is in force, the template is inactive, nothing is being billed.
• Amount — QuickBooks bills a different figure from the one the agreement states.
• End date — the dates disagree, or QuickBooks has none at all and will bill past the end of the term for ever.

A template it could not read is never counted as agreement. If the check cannot see something, it says so rather than reporting all clear.

Ending an agreement in HootQuill stops its billing in QuickBooks — see Renewals and ending an agreement.