Auto-generate invoices on a schedule
Turn on automatic invoice generation so every family is billed on their plan's cadence without you clicking anything.
Once every enrolled child has a billing plan, NestliCare can create invoices for you automatically, on each plan's cadence. You set it up once and there's nothing to click each cycle.
Turn it on
- Go to Billing & Payments → Invoices.
- Find the Auto-Invoice Generation panel near the top.
- Turn on Enable Auto-Generation.
Three settings appear when you enable it:
- Generate Ahead (days): how many days before a billing period starts its invoice is raised. 0 raises it on the period's first day; 3 raises it the Friday before a Monday to Sunday week. Weekly and bi-weekly only; monthly always generates on the 1st.
- Due After (days): how many days after an invoice is generated it's due.
- Auto-Send to Families: on sends each invoice to the family as soon as it's generated; off leaves it as a draft for you to review and send. Read the section below before turning this on.
Once it's on, the Upcoming filter appears on the invoice list: a forecast of exactly what the next 30 days of runs will create, run by run, computed with the same logic the job uses. Make it a habit, especially after changing plans or discounts. See See and skip upcoming invoices.
When it runs
The job runs each morning from 9:00 AM in your center's timezone and creates invoices for whichever billing intervals are due that day:
- Monthly plans generate on the 1st of the month.
- Weekly plans generate every Monday.
- Bi-weekly plans generate every other Monday. Every family shares the same fortnight unless you give one a different bi-weekly cycle start.
With Generate Ahead set, weekly and bi-weekly invoices are raised that many days before their Monday instead (the period on the invoice stays the same Monday to Sunday week). Monthly plans ignore Generate Ahead and keep to the 1st.
So turning it on midweek won't produce weekly invoices until the next Monday. It bills each family based on their child's plan, and it never creates a second invoice for a period it already billed, no matter how many times the morning job re-checks. Any active discounts and subsidies are applied automatically when the invoice is generated.
Hourly plans bill after the period, not before
Everything above describes fixed plans, which are billed in advance: the Monday run covers the week that's starting.
Hourly plans can't work that way, because the hours don't exist until the period is over. They're billed in arrears on the same schedule: the Monday run covers the week that just finished, and the 1st covers the month that just ended.
Two consequences worth knowing:
- A family with one child on a fixed plan and another on an hourly plan gets two invoices on the same morning, covering different periods. That's correct, not a duplicate.
- Auto-Send never applies to hourly invoices. They always land as drafts, because their amounts come from attendance records that may need a correction first. See Review before sending.
Late pickup fees ride the same weekly arrears run and follow the same rule: always drafts, never auto-sent. A family with no hourly plan but a late pickup that week gets a small draft with just the fee.
Auto-Send sends real emails. Treat it with respect
With Auto-Send off (the default), every generated invoice lands as a draft. A wrong amount in a draft costs you nothing: fix it, or void it, and send when it's right.
With Auto-Send on, every generated invoice is emailed to its family the moment it's created. There is no draft stage and no review step, so a wrong billing plan becomes a wrong invoice in a parent's inbox, at scale, before you've had coffee.
That's why turning it on asks you to confirm: the dialog shows you what the next run would email and asks you to attest that you've reviewed the Upcoming view and the amounts are correct. Don't tick that box as a formality. Open Upcoming, read the runs, and only come back when every family, amount, and date is exactly what you expect.
Two guardrails apply even with Auto-Send on:
- Hourly and attendance-fee invoices are never auto-sent. Their amounts come from attendance records that may need a correction first, so they always land as drafts. See Review before sending.
- Skipped invoices are never created at all, so nothing is sent for them either.
Families on the other bi-weekly week
Bi-weekly billing runs one fortnight for the whole center by default. If a family's contract started on the other week, you do not have to move them or invoice them by hand: give that family its own cycle start.
- Open the family from Billing & Payments → Accounts.
- Under Recurring billing, find Bi-weekly cycle. It reads Standard cycle until you change it, and only appears for families with a bi-weekly plan.
- Click Change, pick the Monday their fortnight starts on, and read the preview. It lists their next three invoices with the real generation and due dates under your current Generate Ahead and Due After settings.
- Click Save.
From then on that family is billed every 14 days from that Monday, and the Upcoming view shows their runs on their own dates. Everyone else stays on the standard cycle. Choose Use the standard cycle on the same row to put a family back.
Skip a family, or skip a cycle
- One family, one run (an agreed absence, a family that paid another way): use Skip on the Upcoming view. Every other family bills as normal, and the skip only covers that single run.
- Everyone, one run (a closure week, say): turn Enable Auto-Generation off before 9:00 AM on the run's morning, then turn it back on afterward. Nothing generates while it's off.
Troubleshooting
Nothing generated this morning. Check the date. Weekly and bi-weekly plans run on Mondays (or the Generate Ahead day before them), and monthly plans on the 1st. If today isn't one of those, there's nothing to generate. Generation also runs from 9:00 AM in your center's timezone, so before then there's nothing to see. The Upcoming view shows the exact day of every run in the next 30 days.
One family generated nothing while everyone else did. Check the Upcoming view for a Skipped badge on that family; someone may have skipped them for the run. Undo the skip before the next run, or bill them manually for the missed period.
One family wasn't billed. Make sure their child has an active enrollment with a billing plan attached, and that a matching interval was due that day. See Create a billing plan.
A line-item amount looks off. The job uses whatever plan, discount, and subsidy are active at run time. Confirm the family's current plan and any discounts are correct.