This article reviews the essentials of managing client billing. Owl Practice has all the tools you will need to manage client billing successfully. You will use Owl to invoice for sessions and non-session charges, manage outstanding client balances, and record payment
Types of Billables
You can create two types of client billings:
- Session charges.
- Non-session charges.
For example, an individual therapy session for a client will be a Session Charge. A book that you supply and bill the client for is a Non-Session Charge.
The majority of your client billing in Owl will be Session Charges, so these articles will focus on Billable Session Charges.
Your New Owl Billing Workflow
Before you start using Owl for billing, let's go over the basics of your new billing workflow. For every billable item, you will create two types of billing records for your clients: Invoices and Receipts. Invoices and Receipts are both financial records indicating money transferring hands, but they happen at different points and in different directions:
Invoices are for you (the therapist) to show that you have done work which requires payment. You give this to a client to request that they pay for your services. Owl uses invoices to track outstanding balances.
Receipts, on the other hand, are generated when your client actually pays you - it's the proof that they did, in fact, pay you.
You will generate both an invoice and receipt for every billable charge in Owl. You will always create the invoice and then the receipt. You must always generate your invoice before recording a payment. Owl uses invoices to understand balance owing on the client account when you record a payment. For every session in Owl, your billing workflow will always be to generate an invoice and then record a payment to create a receipt.
If your practice will not be supplying invoices to clients you will still need to generate them in Owl to track balance owing and payment received. Although you will create both an invoice and a receipt for each billable, you do not need to supply either invoices or receipts to your clients if it is unnecessary.
Please review the following articles before using Owl for client billing:
These are just the essentials, but this guide contains more resources and answers to common questions related to billing should you have further questions, so be sure to explore!