Hi. Our company sell services that are paid regularly in advance by our clients. They “top-up” and as they receive the services they are invoiced and their credit reduced. Although they are not invoiced they must pay a regular advance every month. Is there any way to create recurring prepayments in a similar way as recurring invoices so when a client fails to pay the advance that is shown in the dashboard??
You can apply a prepayment to a client account.
Sales > View Clients > Click on your selected client > About half way down the page on the right there’s an option to add a prepayment.
You can then just send them an invoice and deduct it off your clients account
Hi Ryan, thank you for your answer. I am already using that option, but I would need to do it every month for every client (more that 200). What I would like is an option to create automatic recurring prepayments so they are created automatically every month and collected from GoCardless. That would also make more easier the credit control of them.
@Glenn - perhaps add this to the feature requests?
I think what you may need to do here is use GoCardless directly and feed it back into QuickFile (not sure if Zapier could help with the feeding of data between the two?). GoCardless allows you to set up subscriptions.
I can’t answer for @Glenn, but I don’t think this would be a common scenario. I’m not 100% sure, but I think you may be able to automate it via the API. I’ll have a look tomorrow when I’m a bit more awake and on a computer, and I’ll come back to you. 
[Edit]
As promised, I’m a bit more awake now than what I was at 1am this morning! There is a function in the API that could potentially allow you to do this, and allocate it to the Client account.
If you want help setting this up, let me know, either on here or via a PM.
For reference: http://api.quickfile.co.uk/1_1/methodView.aspx?schema=Client_NewDirectDebitCollection#Link18
Would a bank tagging rule work? Are these prepayments showing up on your bank statement?
You can set a rule based on the bank description so that when you import a bank statement it automatically tags those items as a prepayment to client x, y or z.
Hi Glen. That is what I am doing now. But that would not show any warning if the client did not pay the or top-up in term. I would only realise that when their credit expires. I’d need to check the upaid invoices daily (they are invoiced against the credit on their accounts when they recieve the services). It would be nice to have an option to setup an “obligation to pay” without issuing an invoice. The best solution seem to be setting the recurring charge directly with Gocardless (thanks parker1090!). Unfortunately no all my clients pay by DD, some pay by standing order.
I’m not really sure how we’d go about solving that? An “obligation to pay” without an invoice doesn’t sound a good option to me as it would essentially just introduce some new concept and create confusion amongst users. It’s not really a recognised method in accounting.
We need to stick to the convention of invoicing as a means of requesting payment. I would have though there’s a better way to solve this problem without introducing new features.
One idea that springs to mind is using recurring journals. You can use these to make a regular monthly entry on a bank account, you could use a virtual bank account to deposit all those funds and compare with what you have actually received.
Obviously the best way to remove long term manual intervention is to get them on Direct Debits as @Parker1090 recommended.
It is not an “obligation” in the legal meaning. It is like the utilities companies. They expect you to pay monthly a fix amount that is not invoiced. It is just money in advance to cover future invoices. But they expect you to pay the same day every month even if your account is in credit (which usually is). If you don’t pay the advance they will call you. In our case it will be resolved by setting the recurrent payments directly in Gocardless. Thank you for your help in this matter.
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