Consignment billing & payments

This article covers the finance side of consignment stock: how charges build up, how you bill the customer, and how you record what they pay. For creating agreements and moving stock see Agreements, receiving & returns.

Xero is the finance system of record. Until the Xero integration is live, myWork tracks billing and payments natively (below). When Xero is connected, issuing a bill will post it to Xero and payment status will sync back; recording a payment here becomes the offline fallback. Nothing you set up now is wasted.

Charges - what the customer owes

Every billable event on an agreement writes a charge to its ledger (the History tab). Charges are:

• Storage rent - accrued automatically each billing cycle (see Rent accrual below).
• Receipt fee and Handling in - when consignment stock is received.
• Shipment fee and Handling out - when stock is returned to the owner.
• Setup fee - a one-off when the agreement starts.
• Minimum top-up - tops a cycle's rent up to the agreed minimum.

A charge starts life as Pending invoice - owed, but not yet on a bill. A no-cost agreement (Billable off) accrues nothing.

Rent accrual

Storage rent is worked out per billing cycle as rate ? basis ? chargeable periods, where the basis depends on the agreement's charge type:

• Per unit - units on hand.
• Per location - number of distinct locations the stock occupies.
• Flat - a fixed amount per period.

Free days from the start date are not charged, and a minimum per cycle is topped up if the rent falls short. Rent accrues only for Active, billable agreements on a monthly or weekly cycle that have a rate set.

Accrual runs automatically once a day (it can be paused by an administrator), and an admin can also run it on demand. A suspended agreement pauses accrual.

Bills - grouping charges to invoice

Charges are billed in groups called bills (CBILL-...), managed on the agreement's Billing tab.

1. Generate bill - bundles every un-billed (Pending invoice) charge on the agreement into a new Draft bill. Review it (expand the row to see the charges it contains).
2. Issue - turns the draft into an Issued bill: it stamps the issue date and a due date (from the agreement's payment terms), and marks the bundled charges Invoiced.
3. Record payment - enter an amount, date, method and reference. Paying part of the bill leaves it Partially paid with an outstanding balance; paying the balance marks it Paid and stamps the paid date. You can record several payments.
4. Void - cancels a bill and releases its charges back to Pending invoice so they can be re-billed. A bill that already has a payment recorded cannot be voided (reverse the payment outside the system first).

Seeing what's paid and what isn't

The Rent & occupancy report (Procurement & Logistics -> Consignment Stock -> Rent & occupancy report) shows, per agreement and as a total:

• Uninvoiced - charges not yet on an issued bill,
• Billed - total of issued bills,
• Paid - received against them,
• Outstanding - still owed.

Per agreement, the Billing tab is the detailed view: each bill's status, amount, paid, outstanding, and its charges and payment history. See Reports & PDFs for the full report and the downloadable documents.