How-To Video
Introduction
Invoicing is the first important stage in managing the finances of your Early Years setting all from within your all-in-one, management platform. Nursery Story's invoicing module is seamlessly integrated with our Attendance module, cleverly bringing together all the vital details throughout your account into an easy-to-use invoicing feature.
Get started today and start generating beautiful, informative invoices ready to share directly with parents and carers today.
Invoicing is available for our Growth Tier members only. For more information about how to upgrade, please visit our Website.
Who is this Article relevant for?
Invoicing is a feature available to our Growth Tier users
Nursery Owners and Directors: Individuals in leadership roles who oversee the operations and management of the business finances, seeking efficient solutions to streamline their business finances
Operations Managers: Professionals responsible for the day-to-day operations of early years settings, including scheduling, attendance tracking, and invoicing.
Administrative Staff: Individuals handling administrative tasks in nurseries, such as managing bookings, generating invoices, and maintaining attendance records.
Early Years Practitioners: Professionals working directly with young children in nurseries, pre-schools, and early years settings who are responsible for managing attendance and invoicing or as room leaders dealing with daily registers.
Parents: While not the primary target audience, parents also benefit indirectly from the Invoicing module, as it ensures accurate invoicing and provides transparency in attendance records.
What is required before I can start using Invoicing?
Before we start, it is important that you have run through all the necessary setups. You can find out how to do this by running through the following collection of articles:
Navigation
First off, let's tell you where you will find invoicing.
Navigate to: Bookings > Invoicing
Invoicing Homescreen
Next, let's get you familiar with the Invoicing home screen
Attendance & Invoicing table
Filters
Actions
Page Navigation
Attendance & Invoicing Table
The Attendance & Invoicing table is where you will manage the day-to-day invoicing functions for your Early Years setting. We will explore how to generate an invoice and manage the process in a later article, for now, we will highlight the table and explain each area.
The table is broken down into 3 sections:
1. Child Overview
The Child overview is an overall summary of all Attendance & Invoicing activity logged for a child within the set filters. Most commonly this will include all relevant data for the current academic year.
The Table includes:
Children (Details) - Image, Name, Age in months
Total Attendance - Total value of all attendance data for this child. Includes both future bookings and past invoiced items
Total Extras - Total value of all Extras data for this child. Includes both future bookings and past invoiced items
Funding - Total of all funding deductions taken from generated invoices
Payments - Cumulated total of all paid invoices
Outstanding - Cumulated total of any unpaid invoices combined
Next Due Date - When is the next expected payment due
Account Status - Determined by live Invoice Status
2. Childs Bookings
When a child has active bookings, they will appear within the Childs Bookings table. Bookings are broken down into:
Attendance
Extras
These are bookings that have not yet been invoiced and so is a good way to calculate how many future bookings a child has in their bookings calendar. Once invoiced, bookings are deducted from these totals
3. Childs Invoices
Invoices generated for a child will be stored within the Childs Invoices table. Only invoices that meet the filter criteria will be visible.
Invoices can be communicated either as one-offs or as a monthly plan, you can learn more about that by Generating an Invoice
One-Off
Monthly
Filters
Whether you have only a few children or a few hundred profiles, quickly manage your invoicing table through the use of our simple filters:
1. Search child by name
Quickly navigate to an exact child by searching for them by name. great for if you are looking to quickly jump into individual children's invoicing data.
2. Filter by Academic Year
Invoicing is presented by academic year. By default, the current academic year will be selected based on today's date, but you can update this at any time to move to past or future years.
Hints: Attendance & Extras are filtered by each day that falls within the academic year, Invoices are filtered by Create Date
3. Filter by Room
Narrow your search by simply selecting the room that you wish to manage. By default, 'All Rooms' is selected
4. Filter by Invoice Status
Quickly pull up invoices by their status for quick management. Invoices status' available are:
Draft
Sent
Overdue
Paid
Refunded
Void
Actions
This is where you will manage your invoicing, generate your invoices, update invoice status' and download invoices ready to share with parents.
Update Invoice Status
Action Menu
Download Invoice
1. Update Invoice Status
You will learn all about Invoicing in a later article (Add Link) when we get onto managing an Invoice, but for now, it is important to know that Invoices are updated manually by updating their status as you work through the workflow.
The available status' are:
Draft - New Invoices will always be created as a draft
Sent - An invoice that has been sent out to parents & carers
Overdue - An invoice that's due date has elapsed
Paid - An invoice that has had a payment received and confirmed
Refunded - Any Paid invoice that has had to be refunded
Void - No longer require an invoice? Simply void it
Some states are automatic and therefore can not be manually selected. You will therefore only be able to mark invoices as:
Hints: Not all invoice statuses are available to be moved from another status
We will also cover this in greater depth when we run through Managing an Invoice (Add Link)
2. Action Menu
Perform your invoicing tasks using the Action Menu.
Here you can:
View Invoice - With an invoice selected, View Invoice will open the invoice
Generate Invoice - Generate individual or invoices on mass by selecting 1 or more children
Add Bookings - Require a last-minute addition to children's bookings. Launch a bookings calendar straight from your invoicing page
Hints: Depending on what you have selected, will determine what actions are available for you to select. View Invoice can only be selected when 1 invoice is selected. Similarly, Generate Invoice requires children's bookings. If a child has no bookings selected, then you will not be able to generate an invoice.
3. Download Invoice
Perform your invoicing tasks using the Action Menu.
Here you can:
Download 1 or bulk Invoice(s)
Download as PDF - Download an invoice to share with parents
Download as CSV - Export data for accounting
Hints: Download invoices will only be available when 1 or more invoices have been selected. You will see a counter informing you of the number of invoices currently in your selection
You will learn more about how to effectively use the Download Invoice in our article, Downloading an Invoice.
4. Page navigation
Easily manage your invoicing page view with these simple tools to effectively re-order your screen to match your preferences.
Sort Children by First or Last Name
Select whether to show 20, 35 or 50 children on your page view
Navigate through pages to access more children
Hints: Depending on the size of your EarlyYears setting, will define how you wish choose to use these filters. Defaults are set as: First name, 20 per page, Page 1 and it will always revert to this after a page refresh
What's Next?
This article has introduced you to the basic navigation of our Invoicing page, learn more about how to use Nursery Story's invoicing feature in the following articles:
We hope you found this article informative. We welcome any questions you might have so please feel free to reach out to us via the Intercom OR email us at support@nurserystory.co.uk if you have any further questions