Six Tips to Get the Most Value Using OpenAir Invoicing

A complete professional services automation software should provide a company with essential functionalities to efficiently run its core business processes. A crucial one of those functions is invoicing. Invoicing plays a vital role in the success of any business. It reflects an organization’s ability to carefully manage its resources by maintaining a healthy cash flow.

NetSuite OpenAir recognizes the value of efficient, accurate, and transparent billing. The software allows you to create project invoices one at a time or in bulk. You can make them manually or have them configured to generate them in automated runs.

This week’s article will discuss six tips and best practices to help you get the most out of OpenAir for your invoicing needs and covers the following:

• How to number invoices
• Customizing expense item layout
• Enabling and utilizing retainers
• Leveraging billing codes
• Invoice email option features
• Key references that improve transparency

 Invoice Numbering

Managing invoice numbering can sometimes be a complicated affair. Usually, many users set a sequence to start at a specific number, which is a great thing to do. However, things can get complex if you want multiple sequences. Thanks to OpenAir, you have a couple of options for implementing various sequences — the main ones being invoice prefixes per customer and prefixes per project.

Prefix Per Customer

Suppose you’re invoicing at a customer level. In that case, you can set the prefix for the billing information within each customer in addition to the demographic page, where you have all the address information and contacts. Here, you’ll set the currency and payment terms of the customer. Prefix per customer can be useful if you’re, for example, doing a regional assignment of invoices and want them to have the same look and feel in terms of invoice numbering.

 Prefix Per Project

Users may sometimes have regional organizations that share customers but have their own projects. It can become challenging to invoice at the customer level. OpenAir solves this predicament by allowing you to invoice at the project level. The process is as follows:

• Custom field setup on projects to hold 3-character prefixes
• Generate invoices with standard numbering
• After invoice approval, run an action increment invoice number officially

Remember, prefix per project is a more stringent numbering option. The prefix is limited to three characters, nothing less and nothing more. If you incorrectly enter two or four characters, you’ll end up with a number saying “ZZZ,” and OpenAir tells you that your character prefix was not set correctly.

Expense Item Layout

It is common for PSOs to separate expenses from time-related charges. However, there also are those who want to combine what they need for time (fixed fee charges) and expenses into a single invoice. In this scenario, OpenAir allows you to create a separate layout within the invoice and assign it to expenses.

In addition, OpenAir further allows you to customize your invoice layout. You can achieve this by enabling custom groupings, allowing you to group related expenses, say, transportation expenses (airfare, taxi, bus, train, etc.) under one category.

The software also allows you to send invoices. You no longer need to attach a PDF to the invoice sends feature. The feature has been updated, saving you the trouble of going through the tedious manual process, especially if you have multiple attachments. The report will automatically bolt onto the invoice as a link.

Key Layout Features

OpenAir allows you to override specific terms on the invoice and have them personalized and unique to your needs or situation. The feature is particularly useful for foreign market users who want to personalize language, currency, taxation, etc. It’s a highly recommended feature that enables users with various needs to customize the software and see what they need to see while still having it function normally.

Thanks to OpenAir’s formatting options, you can also get creative with invoice headers. For example, you have options to suppress the project name, include/exclude payment terms, show calculated due dates, or incorporate additional fields depending on the customer.

Invoice Notes Custom Header

OpenAir has a switch that lets you add a custom header to the bulk invoice creation process. Instead of going through the procedure manually, the software allows you to bulk-create all the invoices and bring in custom language automatically to every invoice.

Retainers

Retainers, a form of deposit or prepayment, come in handy when asking for a portion of the payment before a project begins. The retainer feature is included in OpenAir. It allows you to track prepayment and apply it to the invoice where work is done to know what is owed minus the prepayment. However, please note retainer feature is not enabled in new accounts, but you can contact support to have it enabled.

Billing Code

A billing code is a common invoicing feature in OpenAir that lets you group invoices by customers or projects. It is a label that helps categorize and identify customers who share specific characteristics—for example, weekly, monthly, deliverable, semi-annually, region, milestone, etc. Billing codes OpenAir are self-defined values limited to two characters.

In the invoice creation process, you’ll see a billing codes field where you can enter a billing code or multiple billing codes separated by commas. OpenAir will pull out invoice data for projects or customers aligned with these billing codes.

Billing codes have multiple use cases and are thus particularly useful for large organizations with multiple jurisdictions, several functional business units, countless clients, numerous projects, and multiple billing timelines.

Email Invoice Options

Besides automatically attaching expenses to the invoice send feature, you can also automatically attach a PDF of the invoice to the email. This is a convenient feature for both you as a user and your clients because it lets you use OpenAir invoice send as if it were email and lets your clients have a detailed view of the attached invoice without being redirected to another platform by an outside link.

The email option is also integrated with the CC and BCC features, allowing you to have multiple recipients. Even better, you can hard code the feature in the invoice option under the settings to automatically include the recipients in the invoice send form. It saves you the trouble of manual entries, forgetfulness, and mistyping email addresses.

Key References

Transparency is key in invoicing. Without it, disputes between you and your clients can arise. To prevent this, OpenAir has an option that allows you to review the history of the invoice in regards to when it was created, approved, sent to the client, and when the customer received it. You can also integrate payment options into the invoicing option to help marry invoices to the transactions received.

Do you want to learn more?

The invoicing features and functionalities above demonstrate the extent to which OpenAir stresses the principles of efficiency, accuracy, convenience, and transparency in billing and invoicing. It is designed to ensure that you optimize every aspect of invoicing functionality for smooth business operations.

Some of OpenAir’s best features are obvious, while others are harder to discover. Learn more in this recent webinar, or signup for our monthly newsletter, where we share tips, best practices, and other information to help you and your organization get the most out of OpenAir.