Home → Arctic Reservations → Invoices → Understanding the View Invoice Page
21.1. Understanding the View Invoice Page
The Invoice Feature in Arctic Reservations offers a lot of versatility in tracking and charging guests, including fees, commissions, discounts and more. The invoice information is then used to generate user-friendly summaries of charges that you can then print or email to the guest.
To get the most out of the Invoice Feature, you must first understand the different parts of the invoice and how Arctic displays charges and fees as well as how to add any additional items that you may need.
Let's start by looking at the View Invoice page:
First, let's look at the information you can access from this screen.
There are several Blue Links that will take you to the information related to the invoice. The links indicated by the arrows will take you to either the Customer Record if you click the customer name or to the Reservation Details pages for the reservations shown on the invoice. These links can come in handy if you need to make modifications to a reservation or customer record or need to verify any details that are not shown on the View Invoice page itself. They make navigating the different aspects of the transaction simple and easy to do.
The big green Add button next to the transactions section will allow you to process transactions such as payments, refunds, schedule future payments, and more. (See subsequent pages for details on running transactions.)
Next, notice the Actions menu at the right of the screen, here is where you can choose to Edit, Email, Print, Mark as Irreconcilable or Remove the invoice.
- The Edit button allows you to manually add or remove charges, discounts or fees. Please Note: The Edit button should only be used if you need to add additional items to the invoice that are not associated with the reservation, additional fees, or discounts. The Edit button should not be used to modify anything directly associated with a reservation, i.e. the number of guests or the number of add ons. To edit items that are directly related to the reservation, you should click the blue Activity Number in the heading of the invoice section for the reservation that needs to be edited. This will take you to the Reservation Details page, where you can then choose to Edit the reservation. If you make edits to a reservation from the invoice to things like guest counts or add on selections, these changes will not be reflected in the actual reservation and can result in either an over allotment or worse a shortage or resources for the reservation. So make sure you always edit the reservation details from the Reservation Details page rather than the invoice.
- The Email button will let you select from any of your invoice email templates and will bring up an email window prefilled with the invoice information and addressed to the customer listed on the invoice.
- The Print button will generate a PDF document that can easily be printed, downloaded or attached to emails.
- The Mark as Irreconcilable button is for those invoices that are never going to be paid because the guest defaulted on payment. This feature will allow you to mark the invoice as irreconcilable so it will stop showing as an unpaid invoice on your Dashboard and in your Invoice Reports.
- The Remove button will allow you to completely delete the invoice. Be aware that this will not remove or cancel the reservations associated with the invoice. It will only delete the invoice and this cannot be recovered. So be very careful when using the Remove button. Note: Only invoices with no transactions, i.e. payments or refunds, can be deleted.
Under the Actions menu, you will notice that Arctic displays the Payment Plan information (determining how much is due when), Cancellation Policy and the Notes (if the invoice is for a reservation or rental, customer notes will automatically be added to this field). All of this information will be included on the invoice you send to the guest or the one you print.
At the bottom of the View Invoice page is the Invoice Activity Log. This is where you will find a log of all of the actions that have been made on the invoice. From creation to edits to payments that were processed, Arctic records the date the actions occurred, the user that completed the action, a summary of the actions applied and a payment amount if the action was a payment. This comes in really handy when trying to find out what might have gone wrong with an invoice when a problem arises.
The last button to be aware of on the View Invoice page, is the Return to Browsing button at the bottom of the screen. This button will return you to the Browse Invoices page.