Prepay Hours allow you to sell blocks of service hours to be applied to an invoice at a later date. They can be tracked in reports, added to service level agreements and contracts or combined with discounts in the form of packaged deals.

The customer knows what they pay every month and the business receives steady revenue whether the service is used or not.

What it Does

• Allows you to set a charge for pre-paid hours and add as a line item on an invoice
• Automatically deducts prepay hours and adjusts balance when labor is added
• Clear/Reset options on Prepay Hours on a recurring invoice
• Works on Ticket Charges/Line Items

What it Doesn't Do

• There isn't an option to add discounts on prepay hours. Discounts must be added using the same discount method for all invoice line items. Learn more about setting up discounts.

Setup

A. Enable Prepay Hours

1. Navigate to Admin > Customers - Preferences.
2. Click Additional Settings.
3. Check the Enable the Prepay Hours Tracking Feature box.     
   
4. Click Save.

B. Create a Prepay Hours inventory item

1. Navigate to the Products & Services tab.
2. Click the New Item button.    
   
3. Fill in required fields.
4. Click the Category dropdown and select Prepay Hours. This is what will trigger the system to adjust automatically when an item with the "Labor" Category is added as a line item to an invoice.    
   
5. Enter the Price Retail for ONE hour of prepaid labor. IMPORTANT: You can only create an item for ONE hour, not multiple hours. If you want to sell a block of, say, 20 hours, you will enter the price here for one hour of labor. When you add the item to a ticket or invoice, you will enter a quantity of 20.
6. Finally, click the Create Product button.

Sell Prepaid Hours

You can now add Prepay Hours as a line item to an invoice.

1. Create an invoice in whatever manner you want.
2. In the field below LINE ITEMS, enter the prepaid item name you created and select it.   
   
3. Again, if you want to sell a block of 15 hours, for example, enter 15 for the QTY.
4. Click Create Line Item. You will then see the total price for the quantity sold.   
   
5. Complete check out by clicking the Take Payment button.

As soon as you add the prepaid hours to the ticket, they will show up in the customer's account, even if they haven't paid for them yet.

Apply prepaid hours toward labor charges

1. Add labor hours to a ticket like normal.
2. When ready to invoice, click Make Invoice.
3. It will automatically apply any remaining prepaid hours against labor hours. If the amount of labor hours exceed the prepaid balance, it will bill the remaining labor hours at their standard rate.

Confused about how to deduct hours? The main thing to remember is that:

• Inventory items with the category "Prepay hours" ADD prepaid hours to a customer's account.
• Inventory items with the category "Labor" SUBTRACT these hours from the customer's account.

Set up Expiring Prepay Hours

If you plan to have your Prepay Hours expire and reset at the end of the month you can set it up by following the simple steps below.

Head over to the "Invoices" tab" and select the "Inventory Modules" drop down.

Then select Recurring Invoices and from there click on the yellow edit button to edit an existing Recurring Invoice.

Check the box that says "Clear/Reset Prepay Hours (before this runs)"

Add the Prepay Hours item as a Line item. And you are all set!

Set up Deductible Labor

There may be cases where you will need a labor item to show up on the ticket timer for tracking but don't want the pre-pay hour pulled for that labor item.

To do this simply add a sub-category to the "Labor" category that doesn't start with "Labor".

For example, all of these categories would deduct from PrePay Hours

Labor
Labor - Labor A
Labor - Labor B

These Subcategories would not deduct "Pre-Pay Hours"

Labor - Non-PrePay Hours
Labor - Misc

Key Words: Prepay Hours, Block Hours, Contract Hours, Block Time, Pre-Sold Time, Contract Time, Complementary Time