The Ready to Send Workflow

In ServiceCEO, every invoice has a "Sent?" value. This value indicates where the invoice is located in the Ready to Send workflow. This workflow defines when the invoice can be or has been sent to the customer, and contains three steps:

Not ready to send. The invoice is not ready to be sent to the customer - it's either not created, incomplete, etc.
Ready to send. The invoice is ready to be printed and sent to the customer. All ready to send invoices are displayed on the Unsent Invoices tab of the Billing Center.
Sent. The invoice has been sent to the customer. The date on which the invoice was sent is recorded. All invoices that have been sent to the customer but not yet paid are displayed on the Unpaid Invoices tab of the Billing Center dialog box.

Note!

Note:
Ready to send is the default Sent? value for all invoices EXCEPT for projects. The project's invoice will have a Sent? value of Not ready to send until the last work on the project is completed.

The differences in this workflow for the two main billing methods are described below.

For Automatic Billing The default Billing method where an invoice is created immediately after a job is completed or printed and automatically billed to the default customer or bill payer. Only one Invoice is created per Job., you can mark an invoices as "ready to send" on the Invoice page of the Completion Wizard. Once marked as ready to send, you can print and/or mark them as sent from the Invoice Editor page (see the Viewing an Invoice section for more) or the Unsent Invoices tab of the Billing Center.
For Advanced Billing A billing method where you can manually define how to split the billing of particular invoices (how much will be billed to what person at what time?). See the Defining Billing Properties section of the Implementation Manual for more details., you can edit an invoice's Ready to send value on any tab of the Billing Center. In addition, you can print and mark invoices as sent on the Unsent Invoices tab of the Billing Center.

Once an invoice as been marked as ready to send, you can mark it as sent by previewing the invoice. You can preview an invoice in several sections of ServiceCEO:

From the Unsent Invoices or Find by Number tab of the Billing Center.
From a job record, click the Print Preview button and select Invoice from the pop-up menu.
Run the Invoice report from the Financial report category. See the Printing/Previewing Reports section for details.
From the Invoice Viewer, click Preview & Send. See the Viewing an Invoice section for more.

Regardless of how you preview the invoice, the invoice will appear in a report preview page. From here, you can print the report, e-mail it to the customer, or take whatever steps necessary to ensure your customer receives the invoice.

When you close the invoice preview page for an unsent invoice that has a Sent? value of "Ready to Send", a “Mark as Sent?” dialog box will appear when you close the Report Preview screen. Click Yes to mark the Invoice as sent.

Once an invoice has been marked as sent, it will appear on the Unpaid Invoices tab of the Billing Center.

Note!

Note:
You can also mark Ready to Send invoices as sent by using the Statement report. The Statement report is a consolidation of invoices over a given date range.

To see the Ready to Send workflows in a graphical format, click these links:

Note that you can always change the Sent? value of an invoice in the Invoice Viewer or the Billing Center. Thus, if you want to reverse the workflow - marking a Sent invoice as Ready to Send or a Ready to Send invoice as Not Ready to Send - you can do so in those locations.