This article will provide best practices when viewing your Invoices Coming Due Report and Forecasted Invoices Report.
The ability to predict revenue for your studio is critical in order to effectively plan and map out goals for future months. The Invoices Coming Due report used in conjunction with the Forecasted Invoices report is the best way to estimate future revenue. However, there are questions surrounding these two reports and how to use them together. Continue reading to learn how to run these reports separately, and then how to use their results together to predict future invoices and funds.
Using the Reports Individually
The Invoices Coming Due report will show invoices that are already generated and due in a selected date range. The Forecasted Invoices report will show invoices that have not yet been generated for all active, auto-renewing (evergreen) agreements. The invoices shown in this report are expected to be automatically generated by the system during the selected date range. HERE is a link to an article explaining how to use these reports individually.
Using These Reports Together
To determine what invoices you can expect to come due in the future, you will run both reports using the same date ranges and simply add their totals together; the Invoices Coming Due report showing what is already scheduled to draft and the Forecasted Invoices report showing what is expected to draft.
Missing Invoices
Often studios will compare the number of upcoming invoices in a 30-day period with their number of active members and be concerned when the number of invoices expected is lower than the number of active members. There are a number of reasons why an active member may not have an invoice in the date range you are viewing. Below is a list of possibilities for missing invoices.
- Frozen Member: The active member is frozen and therefore their monthly invoices have been pushed ahead for the duration of the freeze.
- Members Scheduled to Cancel: Both reports by default are set to exclude invoices scheduled to cancel before they are due. If members are scheduled to cancel prior to the date range you are viewing in the report, no invoices will show for these members. You can check for future agreement cancellations by going to Reports > Sales > Agreements Log > Cancels.
- Complimentary Memberships: Members may have a complimentary membership where they are active, but not charged a monthly invoice.
- Incorrect Expiration Dates: Cancelled members may not have been cancelled correctly and still have future expiration dates; this will cause the members to show in your Active Member list even though they have no future invoices. You can find these members in Member Lookup by using the Misc. filter, “Only Cancelled Agreement”.
- Manually Adjusted Invoices: Member’s invoices may have been pushed out by staff or maybe a member’s agreement has been unfrozen early and their invoices were not adjusted back to the appropriate dates.
Below is a screenshot highlighting some Misc. Filters that can be helpful in identifying members with no upcoming invoices. Note that filtering by “Agreement Future Payments” will identify members that have future payments; if you select this filter and see your total number of active members drop, this will indicate how many members have agreements with no upcoming payments/invoices.
Best Practices
To ensure that your Active Members total is correct, here are a few best practices to avoid inaccurate data in your site:
- When cancelling an agreement, make sure the expiration date for the member is set as the same date as the cancellation.
- When unfreezing an agreement prior to its scheduled unfreeze date, make sure to adjust the invoices to their appropriate dates and set the expiration date of the member so that it is in sync with the latest generated unpaid invoice.
- Instead of pushing out a member’s invoice dates, place the member on freeze so your studio can see at a glance that funds are not currently being collected from this member.