Automatically and programmatically set due date on new invoice

[avisonjohn]

hi all.

 

I have one client in particular, who only make a payment run once a fortnight.

 

Is there a way to automatically set the due date of an invoice by eval'ing some PHP code or something similar - basically using PHP to find how many days away the next date occourence is and then adding X amount of days to that?

 

The reason I ask is that I have a client who has a really weird way of paying invoices and because of it, they always end up with late payments.

 

Lets say they make a payment run on 15th and 28th of each month.

If I send them an invoice on the 31st March, they will not process it in their system until the 15 April and they then set the invoice to be paid 30 days from this date which will be 30th April.

I then have to wait until the next payment run which will be 15th May, until I actually get paid.

 

It is a well known company and quite a large company at that, but after speaking to a few people in their accounts department and even one of their directors, I am told that this is how they have always operated.

 

So if I carry out work for them on the 1st March, I have to potentially wait upto 11-12 weeks before being paid.

One if the downsides to this is that if I send the invoice to the customer on the 14th, if they are out of office or simply forget to approve the invoice for payment and send it to their accounts department until the 16th, I have wait another 2 weeks on top of the 12 weeks because they won't process the invoice into their system until the next payment run which is 2 weeks down the line.

 

I dread to think what would happen if the invoice never actually got to them for whatever reason or they forgot about in entirely.

[ebmocwen]

If this is only a single client then a manual operation makes most sense.

1) If the client should not have late payments added, simply disable this feature for this client.

2) Set a reminder in your phone/PDA to manually raise invoice every 12th and 25th of the month for outstanding work. This allows three days for invoice to get to right department in time for payment run.

3) I'm not sure how many billable items you have for this client but you could consider invoicing as soon as you've done the work so you will always catch the next payment run.