Five Simple Tips to Simplify and Clarify Your Invoices in OpenAir

Every touchpoint that a services organization has with its clients is important. It’s easy to focus on the quality of the interactions with the sales team, the project team, or the customer support team, but these aren’t the only interfaces your professional services organization has with your clients. Invoicing is a key touchpoint and one that can have a significant impact on your customer’s experience.

NetSuite’s OpenAir offers a number of features that make your invoices cleaner and clearer, and most are simple to implement if you know they are there. Below we’ve detailed a number of these pointers, but if you’re looking for even more suggestions, check out our webinar, OpenAir Invoicing Tips and Tricks.

Custom Invoice Numbering

Custom numbering can streamline your ability to view and report on invoices. OpenAir makes it very easy to do this at the customer level and, with a bit more effort, to do at the project level.

Adding Custom Invoice Numbering by Client

For customers, adding a prefix is as simple as setting up the attribute in the billing information tab for that customer. But this feature can be used for more than that. For example, you may wish to report on all customers associated with a group at the same time. Assigning a prefix associated with a group at the customer level would allow you to pull all of the invoices for that group at once, even across customers.

Adding Customer Invoice Numbering by Project

Of course, some customers span multiple groups. In that case, you can’t set a prefix at the customer level that would align with your internal groups. Instead, though, a prefix can be set at the project level. While not as simple as the customer level setting, doing so can still save a lot of time and effort.

Within a project’s custom fields, you can enable and set a three-letter prefix code. Once enabled, prepending the prefix occurs during the approval process. During this process, one of the actions will be to apply the incremental invoice numbering, which will add both the prefix and the incremental project invoice number.

It’s important to note that when the setting is enabled, you must set a three-letter prefix – if it’s missing, or there are fewer or more than three letters, OpenAir will automatically add ZZZ as the prefix instead. If you are seeing invoices with a ZZZ prefix, you should check your project settings.

Embedding Expenses into Your Invoices

Adding project expenses into an invoice can be confusing if they are mixed in with other items, like hourly charges. OpenAir offers the ability to put these two together, cleanly, with alternative layouts.

To do this, you’ll need to ensure that the internal switch that allows for alternative invoice layouts is enabled. This permits you to create a separate layout for the expense items, for example, but then embed that layout inside an OpenAir invoice. This gives you finer control over what details are shown for the various line items on the invoice.

Emailing Invoices

Are you emailing invoices directly to clients from OpenAir? This is now easier than ever before, and a few tricks will save you time in the process, too.

Attaching Invoices to Emails

Originally, when you sent a client invoice from OpenAir the platform embedded a link that the customer had to click to see the invoice. Then they had to click for the PDF, and then another click to download it. Needless to say, this was a cumbersome customer experience. Now, by clicking a checkbox within OpenAir, you can attach the invoice directly to the email.

Hard-coded CC and BCC

Some organizations require that an email account always be included as a copy or blind copy on sent invoices. Within invoice options, you can hard code that email address so that the message goes to that account every time, without needing to add it to each invoice or risk forgetting it.

Customize Email Text

Invoices sent from OpenAir have very generic, system-defined text that probably doesn’t reflect your own business’s messaging. The boilerplate message that is sent with all invoices is easily changed under the email invoice settings screen. However, this message can also be customized for specific customers. This can be done via the email body override at the customer level.

Using Billing Codes

Billing codes are an incredibly useful OpenAir feature that rarely gets used. When it comes to invoicing, these two-character codes on a project can save you a lot of time. Projects can be assigned invoice cycles, such as weekly, monthly, semi-monthly, quarterly, and so on. This makes it easy to pull a report that shows all the projects billing around a specific cycle. For instance, you can view the pending billing report and see all of the semi-monthly invoices. These billing codes can also be helpful on the create multiple invoice form, like batching a series of weekly invoices together for creation.

Automated Reminders

Billing reminders can be incredibly useful in spurring clients to pay their open invoices, but it can also be time-consuming. While more involved than turning on a switch within the platform, Top Step has created scripts for clients that send an automated email reminder for overdue invoices. These reminders can improve your accounts receivable without adding additional work to your teams. If you’re interested in exploring implementing a feature like this, let us know, we’d be happy to help.

These tips for improving and customizing your OpenAir invoices should help decrease questions from your customers and increase the clarity of your invoices. There are even more ideas for you in our webinar, OpenAir Invoicing Tips and Tricks. However, as with our last tip, there is always more that you can do with OpenAir thanks to the flexibility of the platform. If you need help on other ways OpenAir can save you more time or help you be more efficient, check out our resource library, or give us a call. We’re always happy to discuss ways to get the most out of your PSA with you.