Invoices are run, and Pay Advice documents generated, from the context menu of an organisation. The options are only visible if the organisation (or a parent organisation has got Next Invoice Ref or Next Pay Advice Ref set up on the Invoicing and Payroll tab of the Organisation form.
We will deal with them together as the processes are very similar.
As you can see, there is a Pre Invoice / Payroll checks menu option on the same menu. This runs a report showing bookings that don't meet the criteria that you chose to adopt for running invoices / payroll. When you select the Generate Invoices or Generate Pay Advice menu options you will be advised to run these checks.
The dialogs for running invoices and payslips are very similar:
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By default the period cut off will be the beginning of the Monday of the current week. If the period start is left blank then all un-invoiced (or unpaid) events prior to that will be included in the generated documents. Note that in most cases this will only be the recent events, since all prior events will have already been invoiced / paid, and once the event has been completely invoiced / paid it will be ignored.
You can add various selection criteria in the tabs shown. For instance you can include only events from a certain contract (maybe a local authority) or just generate pay for a care worker who is leaving.
The system will include all events that match the selection criterion that belong to the organisation you invoke the context menu from and all child organisations. So you can run invoices for a national multi regional company in one fell swoop, or chose to run them in regions / branches / contracts / for individual clients. (You can get even more granular than that by using Additional Criteria on the Advanced tab, though this requires knowledge of the database query language and will generally be beyond the scope of users without assistance from their support providers).
In the case of generating Pay Advice things are slightly different, since care workers can sit anywhere in the organisation hierarchy. In this case there is an Exclude Children? option on the advanced tab to give the user the option of running payroll just for care workers shared across lower levels of the hierarchy.
By default, both reports will execute as a Dry Run (see the Dry Run? checkbox on the screenshots above). This generates PDF output of the invoice / pay advice and does not update the database. This means you can check the documents until you are happy and then run the process "for real". You do not have to do a dry run if you are confident your data is correct. When you run for real no PDFs are produced and you are sent an email with links to all the Pay Advices / Invoices on the system, along with links to reports that can be used to email the documents to the care workers / purchasers etc.