Create Billing Schedules

Sequence streamlines sales-led billing for B2B companies with pricing complexity such as usage-based pricing.

To begin billing a customer, create a billing schedule in the ‘Billing’ tab under ‘Add new’. A billing schedule links a plan to a customer and determines when invoices are created. To create a billing schedule, you will need at least one plan and customer.

Billing schedules calculate charges and create draft invoices automatically. Each schedule is unique to a customer, but a customer can have several schedules (e.g. for multiple contracts).

Billing schedules can have one of three states:

• Pending: The start date of the schedule is set to an upcoming, future date.
• Active: The billing schedule is running and creating invoices for your customer.
• Completed: The last billing period has been completed.

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Billing periods

You can configure billing with flexibility using Sequence. The start date is when billing begins for the customer. The end date is the last day of the final billing period, such as the last day of a 12-month contract.

To start billing immediately, set the start date to today’s date. Or, set the start date to the first of next month to begin billing then.

The billing frequency determines how often invoices are generated, such as monthly or annually. The billing schedule uses the frequency of the attached plan (daily, weekly, monthly or annually).

When you create a billing schedule, you can flexibly define what day of the month or week you want new billing periods to start. If you want to bill your customers on a monthly basis, you might choose to start new billing periods every 1st of the month, for example. Alternatively if your company uses a Calendar billing model, you can choose today as the day new billing periods should start on.

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Automated invoicing

To automate billing, you can choose to automatically issue invoices to customers when you create a billing schedule. Sequence will finalize the invoice and issue it to your customer automatically (including an email notification with the invoice attached as PDF). You can also enable auto-issuing from the Invoice view of the Dashboard if you want to review and issue the first batch of invoices manually.

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Proration

Sequence automatically calculates charges for partial billing periods. For example, if you set the start date of your billing schedule to today (14/03/2023), but want new billing periods to start on the 1st of each month, the first billing period will be prorated (14/03 - 31/03).

For a billing schedule attached to a plan with a £500 monthly recurring fee, Sequence will calculate the prorated charges for you.

Example calculation:

• Billing start date: 14/03/2023
• Start new billing periods on: 1st of each month
• First billing period (prorated): 14/03/2023 - 31/03/2023 (18 days)
• Invoice total (pre tax): £500 * (18 days / 31 days) = £290.32

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Backdated billing schedules

You can create billing schedules with a start date in the past. Backdated billing schedules will create invoices for past billing periods. If today is the 1st of March and you set the billing schedule start date to 1st of February, recurring monthly, the schedule will automatically create the first invoice for the 1-28 February period.

Backdated billing schedules can be helpful for testing or to migrate existing customer contracts.