AL7 Financial Model
Problems with current system, followed by suggested solutions for AL7. 1. No way to invoice different services for the same animal more than once. Currently, each animal can be invoiced only once. This makes it difficult to invoice clients for animals that visit the clinic a second time. Solution: AL7 will invoice the individual services rendered for animals, not the animals themselves. Of course, the animals will be listed on invoices exactly as they are today, but the system won t care if the same animal is invoiced more than once. Instead, the individual services rendered are guaranteed to be invoiced only once. 2. No way to divide fees among several clients for a single animal. For instance, an organization may receive a grant that partially pays for services for an animal. The grant might pay for surgery, but not for vaccines or vice versa. Currently, there is no simple way to split the cost between the grant money and the paying client. Certainly no automatic way. Solution: New Service Allocators will let you apply part of an invoice cost to another client for a specific service. It acts like a filter, funneling the services you specify to another client, generating a separate invoice in the background. A service allocator is linked to a client, which can have multiple allocators defined. For each allocator, you specify the service you want to allocate and the client who will receive it. When you post the invoice, the services you specified in your allocator(s) are transferred to the client you specified. Service Allocators don t change fees. Fees are always calculated by the animal s fee schedule and do not change as a result of being reallocated. A Service Allocator, once created, stays active until a clinic admin deletes it. Your invoice posting procedure never changes; there s nothing you must remember to do. Existence of Service Allocators will be plain on the main clients page. There is no way to apply a Service Allocator to a posted invoice. Invoices generated in the background by a Service Allocator are treated like any other, but tracked additionally as allocated invoices. 3. Multiple open invoices for the same client cause confusion. Enough said. Solution: In AL7, you will never have to chose or create an invoice before entering animals. You just enter your animals, and the system generates an invoice number when you re ready to post an invoice not before then. In this way, you won t be able to control which animals are invoiced when you post. You can, of course, choose whether to post for one client or all, but you cannot choose which animals. 4. No way to tell easily which invoices are paid and which are not. AL6 reports an overall balance, and provides a running sum of transactions leading up to that balance, but it seems that clients just don t understand that. They want to know which invoices, specifically, are not yet paid. (It is precisely the irregular paying habits of clients that forced me to adopt the rolling balance model in the first place.) Solution: In AL7, you ll enter payments just as you do now as credit transactions in the client s ledger. However, the system will try to match the payments you enter with invoices making a one-to-one connection when possible. You will be able to give the client a straightforward list of unpaid invoices. The rolling balance model will still be in effect underneath, though. It simply has the added benefit of being able to link a single debit (invoice) to a single credit (payment). 5. System doesn t enforce month-end closures. AL6 offers a period closure feature, but I don t think it gets used. I think people are scared to use it, because it takes away all open transactions, removing some visibility into clients payment status. The consequence of never closing periods, though, is that the open transaction list grows beyond manageability to the point where it s embarrassingly hard to read because of it s length. (And never answers the apparently simple question: Which invoices haven t I paid?) This can make it hard to convince clients they owe money.
Solution: AL7 will automatically close the prior month on the first day (or business day) of the month. You won t be able to stop it. If there are mistakes in the prior month, issue correction transactions in the next month. However, it will still offer a 30-day rolling view that lets you see closed transactions. Always having a 30-day rolling view makes it easier to explain a client s balance, but the list of transactions will never span more than 30 days.