Invoices are generated when a billing period is completed. This billing period is defined on the contract itself. It can be defined as monthly, quarterly, half-yearly or yearly. During that billing period, we also have to define the frequency of the advances for that contract. This frequency can be none (no advances are made), monthly, quarterly or half-yearly.

So when the billing period has been completed, the system will generate the invoice for that period. When advances have been paid during that period, they will be deducted from the total amount of the invoice. If advances were not paid by the contractor for whatever reason, they are credited and are not deducted from the amount of the invoice. They still need to be paid and as such the invoice amount will be higher as the advance amount is not deducted.

The same logic of deducting a paid advance is also applied when an end-note is created for a contract. An end-note is the final invoice for that contract when it is ended. It will list all the billing items from the last invoice date onwards (if there was a previous invoice) to the enddate of the contract. If there had not been a previous invoice for that contract, the end note will cover the full period of the contract from start to end date.

If advances were paid during that period for that contract, they will be deducted from the total billing amount of the end-note. If advances were created but not paid by the end user (for whatever reason), they will be credited and will not be deducted from the billing amount of that end-note.

Advances are generally triggered automatically by the Zero Friction. This is usually at the beginning of the month (1st of each month) or when there has been a move-in from a new customer and a new contract is created. In this move-in process, the system will automatically generate the required advance for that month (if needed based on the parameters of the contract).

There are also cases when you want to manually generate the advances. For example if you are billing the advances before the period they were created for. In that case you can manually force the creation of advances for that future period. Another scenario is when advances were automatically generated by the system, but you decided to delete them for various reasons (e.g. wrong amount). Also in that case you can trigger the software to generate the advances again.