18.2. Accounting Volume

*THE BIG WHAT
There are many tools and features available in Accounting > Volume Clients. Here you can invoice volume clients, pay invoices and look at many reports related to accounting.

Creating Invoices

As you check animals out in checkout, the volume client animals are accruing charges. Regardless of whether the volume client pays the same day or not, you will need to generate an invoice. Invoices can be generated daily, biweekly, or monthly – this is a manual process so you can determine the frequency.

Invoices are designed to be emailed to your volume clients. To make sure your clients receive an invoice via email, make sure you have an email on file in their client profile. If you don’t want to email invoices, don’t put an email in the email field. HQ has two email fields, so invoices can be sent to more than one person. There is no way to send an invoice to more than two people, although in settings, you can set it up to send you a copy of the email. Be careful not to enter more than one email address per field. This is incorrect abc@xyz.com;eft@xyz.com. These emails will not be delivered to anyone because there is more than one email crammed into the field.

Contact information for emailing invoices

Confirming Charges/Checkout

*Before we get into how to bill volume clients, it’s critical to understand that all charges can be edited in Settings > Services and Products. The charges are set here in “service” in the price column, but any subsidies that are applied can change this price too.

Changing service prices

!On the Financial tab, you will see what will be charged for each animal. Before you check the animal out, it’s critical to confirm the amount you are charging for the animal is correct. Sex affects the price for each animal, as does the number of services performed during the surgery. So, it’s important to get any changes that happened during surgery into the computer system before checkout.

Here’s an example to illustrate why this is so critical:
Let’s say Tulsa Animal Control brought in 25 cats. You assume all animals received their surgeries, and you’re billing this volume client $30 for cat neuters and $40 for cat spays. Since no one mentioned any changes, you check them all out with the sexes that were given at the time of the appointments. You check them out, then bill the volume client, and they pay via credit card. Then a few weeks later, the shelter realizes that, in fact one of these animals that was previously categorized as a female is actually a male.

Unfortunately, you’ve boxed yourself into a corner because you’ve already billed the client, and they’ve already paid. You can’t simply go into HQ and change the sex because after an invoice is billed, it’s “locked,” meaning to make any changes, you will need to unbill it (and unpay it too, if it was paid) in order to make any changes. Our system works this way by design.

In order to keep everyone sane and happy, we lock all invoices so that an extra $10 cannot be “slipped” into an invoice. They pay the original invoice, but now it’s short by $10, which requires a few phone calls to sort out. So, as an anti-crazymaking strategy, we lock the invoices. Once unlocked, your client will receive a second invoice, and the first invoice will no longer be available via email. It will give them an error.

So, instead of this rigamarole, it’s incumbent upon you to create a way for the vets to let you know of any changes from the original paperwork. These changes include sex, services rendered, and unforeseeable events like the patient dies during surgery or is found to be pregnant, which may both result in an extra charge from your clinic.

Please collect and add all changes that affect changes before you check the animal out. This cannot be emphasized enough. As long as you add all changes into HQ, it will result in headache-free billing and smooth sailing.

Find Invoices

You can easily look up invoices in the Accounting > Invoices screen.

Recent invoices screen

Review Volume Client Credit And Balances

1. Click Accounting > Summary: https://clinichq.com/app#/accounting/volume-summary.

Volume client credit and balance summaries

2. Click any of the active balances to review the history.

Viewing a credit history

Volume Client Payment History

1. This is a key report in HQ. It’s the ledger for the volume client payment history. Navigate to Accounting > VC History: https://clinichq.com/app#/accounting/volume-payment-history.

2. Select a volume client from the drop-down list and review the ledger.

Searching for a volume client's history

Invoice History

Here you can check and see which invoices are still outstanding and how overdue they are.

Filtering for invoice status

Accounts Receivable For VCS

This is your clinic’s accounts receivable report. Select the month, and it will tell you what was due and owed for that time frame. This data is easily exported to an Excel spreadsheet.

An invoice export