Charges vs Invoices

There are no steps on this page - just the one idea that makes every billing screen make sense. Read it once.

The big idea

Wattle keeps two separate things in mind:

• A charge is a line on the client's account: "this client owes us $85 for a consult." Charges build up quietly as you care for an animal.
• An invoice is a document - the tidy bill those charges become, ready to hand over and ask for payment.

Every visit keeps its own bill. The moment the first item is added to a visit, that visit gets a draft invoice, and every later charge joins it. There's no separate pile of loose charges waiting to be gathered up - a charge is on its visit's bill from the moment it exists.

A dog comes in for a vaccination and an exam. The vet ticks "Wellness Exam" ($60) and "C5 vaccine" ($85). Both land on that visit's draft. On the way out, the front desk opens the draft from the client's Financials tab, checks it, and clicks Finalise - it becomes one invoice for $145.

Why one bill per visit? So there's never any doubt about where a charge lives or what a client is being billed for. A pet hospitalised for four days still racks up a dozen charges on the one visit, finalised once at discharge. A multi-pet visit gets one bill per pet's visit, and a single payment can cover all of them. A walk-in bag of food gets its own small bill with no visit attached.

Every charge sits on exactly one bill, and deleting it really deletes it. The bin on a draft removes the charge completely - off the bill, off the visit, stock back on the shelf. If you want to keep the record but not charge for it, set the price to $0 instead.

Draft vs finalised

Invoices and estimates both live in two stages.

Draft = a working bill. Change anything. It has no invoice number and no date - it isn't an official document yet, and can't be paid against or sent.

Finalised = locked and official. The number and the date appear at this moment, and it can be paid, printed and sent.

The most common slip-up is thinking Save means done. Saving keeps your changes on the draft. A finished-looking draft that nobody finalised sits there unbilled forever - the front desk's job at checkout is always that last Finalise.

Nothing is a dead end:

• Draft with an error? Fix the lines directly, or bin the wrong ones - it's still a working bill.
• Finalised too early? Unfinalise pops it back to a draft - as long as no payment is attached to it. It keeps the number and date it already had, so the client never sees a document change identity. If money has been taken against it, either unallocate the payment first (see Taking payments) or leave the invoice alone and raise a credit note.
• Need to cancel an issued invoice? If nobody has seen it yet, Void cancels it but keeps the record, and Un-void restores it. If it has already been emailed or paid, you raise a credit note instead - Wattle offers whichever one applies, in the same place on the ⋯ menu.

Void or credit note is for finalised documents. Delete is for drafts.

The one that trips everyone up: two different Finalise buttons

Two buttons, both saying Finalise, in two places, doing two different things.

Finalising a visit does not finalise its invoice. They're separate finish lines: finish the visit ("the clinical work is done") is usually the vet; finish the invoice ("the bill is official") is usually the front desk. The visit's draft is sitting there either way, holding the charges.

The whole flow

  Vet adds items during the visit
            │
            ▼
   Each charge lands on THE VISIT'S DRAFT INVOICE
   (created automatically with the first charge)
            │
   Vet clicks "Finalise visit"  →  visit is Ready to Pay
            │                      (the draft is still a draft)
            ▼
   Front desk opens the draft from Financials
            │
   Front desk clicks "Finalise"  →  it gets its number and date
            │
            ▼
   Front desk takes payment  →  invoice is paid

If you ever feel lost, two questions answer almost everything: am I dealing with a charge or a document? and is the document a draft or finalised?

Three more things

• A recorded payment doesn't always clear a bill. You usually choose which invoice it pays. If you don't, it sits as credit and the invoice still looks unpaid. See Taking payments.
• An "Overdue" badge on a finalised invoice is normal. That badge is about payment and the due date - a separate idea from draft-vs-finalised.
• Charges are always tied to a patient; invoices only need a client. Keep a patient attached where you can, so you can answer "what was this for?" later.

When adding a charge, the item search leads with Recently used (anything charged in the clinic in the last 7 days) before All items, so your daily staples are at the top. Start typing to search the full catalogue.

Discounting a visit

Press Discount at the top of the billing card. One window, three questions.

Which discount. Anything you've saved in the catalogue (a Valla discount, a staff rate) or a one-off. Picking a saved one fills in the amount and the name, and you can still change both - a saved figure is a starting point, not a fixed price.

How much. One box that reads whichever you type. 20% is a percentage. 20 or $20 is dollars. It shows you underneath what that comes to before you apply it.

What it comes off. Everything on the visit, or only the items you tick. Tick a few and the window shows you exactly how much is coming off each one.

Dollars and percentages both come off every item

Neither adds a line of its own. The reduction lands on the items themselves, and each discounted line shows what came off it.

A percentage applied to the whole visit is stored as a rule: the visit wears a chip (Valla - 20% off) and anything you add afterwards is discounted too.

A dollar amount is shared out across the items in proportion to what each one costs. $100 off a visit with a $200 consult and a $100 vaccine takes $66.67 off the first and $33.33 off the second. The shares always add up to exactly what you typed.

It comes off what you actually charge: with after-hours loading a $100 consult bills at $150, so 10% off is $15. Dispensing and injection fees are discounted too.

Applying a discount replaces the one before it. A visit carries one discount at a time, so you never have to work out what's stacked on what. Remove discount takes it off entirely.

If part of the visit is already on an issued invoice, those items are left alone and Wattle tells you how many and which invoice. Unfinalise that invoice and they'll come along.

You can't discount more than the items come to. Wattle says so and tells you the most that can come off them.

GST looks after itself

Both kinds of discount now reduce each item separately, so every item keeps its own GST treatment and the GST on the bill is right either way. There's nothing to choose between them on tax grounds.

(This used to be a real limitation: a dollar discount was a single line carrying a single GST treatment, so on a visit holding both taxable and GST-free items it couldn't reduce the GST in proportion. That's fixed.)

The one place it still applies is a discount added straight to a client's account, with no visit behind it. There are no items to spread it across, so it stays one line, and only a dollar amount is offered. Wattle says so in the window.

For a discount on a single line of an invoice or estimate, see Estimates and Invoices.

What the discount came to

Above the visit total, the billing card shows the discount as one line - Valla discount, 20% -$30.40. That's the figure a client asks about at the counter, and it's the sum of what came off each item.

A client who always gets a discount

Some people get the same discount every time they come in - a staff rate, a rescue, a neighbourhood you've always looked after. You can put it on the client once instead of remembering it every visit.

On the client's file, Edit → the Account section → Standing discount. Type the percentage and give it a name (the name is what appears on the visit and on the bill, so call it something the owner would recognise).

From then on, every new visit for that client opens with the discount already on it, chip and all, and behaves exactly as if you had typed it in yourself. You can change it or take it off on any single visit without touching the client's file.

A discount can bring a bill down to nothing, and no further

An invoice can't be finalised with a total below $0.00. A discount reduces what a client owes; it can take the bill to zero, but it can't put the clinic in debt to them.

While you're still working, a visit is allowed to sit below zero. That's on purpose: plenty of people add the health-plan discount first and the consult it applies to second, so the running total dips negative for a minute. The card just says how far below zero it is, so you can see it. You can dismiss that note if you'd rather not look at it, and nothing else changes.

It's finalising that stops. If you press Finalise while the discounts come to more than the charges, Wattle says so, shows you both figures, and offers one button: Reduce discount to $250.00 (or whatever the charges come to), which brings the bill to exactly zero. Nothing is changed until you press it, and pressing it doesn't finalise either, so you get to look at the corrected figures first.

If a client has genuinely paid too much, that's a refund, not a discount. Take the discount down to zero at most, then either refund them or raise a credit note against the invoice they were over-charged on. See Taking payments.

Where to go next

Invoices · Estimates · Taking payments · The catalogue · Glossary