How to find and follow up on outstanding customer balances

Within First Class there are a number of ways to generate a list of customers who owe you money.

The main two methods are 

1. Via the payment summary report

2. Via the ledger balance report

Finding outstanding invoices on the payment summary report

The payment summary report is found in the payments list menu.

This report will list all invoices for a selected date range.

Note, the default for this report is to filter by enrolment dates. As long as you select a date range where a student has an active booking, then the associated invoice with that booking will be listed.

To find as list of outstanding invoices you can select the pending status within the payment status filter. You may also wish to include partial invoices as well which would return those invoices that have some balance outstanding.

Example: If you wanted to find a list of ALL invoices that relate to term 4, you would enter your term 4 dates into the student enrolled filters.

If you then wanted to get a list of outstanding invoices for term 4 you can enter the pending and partial filters into the payment status filter.

How to send an email reminder to customers without standing invoices

Using the payment summary report you can send a follow up to customers with outstanding invoices.

Here are the steps to send a bulk follow up 

1. Select all outstanding invoices by using ticking the select all box

NOTE: This will select ALL the invoices in the list view. (You may want to increase the default list view if you have more than 50 invoices listed)

2. Click send email/SMS

This will open the email and SMS feature with your selections loaded.

3. If you have an outstanding invoice template you may choose this from the template list by choosing from the communication type drop down and finding the right template

Alternatively, you can write your own content. Note: If you write your own content you cannot use personalisation such as the customers First name.

4. Click the send communication button to send the email message.

5. Finding customers who owe you money via the ledger balance report

The ledger balance report lists the customer balance of all customers.

You can use the filters in the ledger balance report to identify only those customers with a positive balance only.

You can also filter between customers with current enrolments vs those with no enrolment.

Question: Why am I seeing a difference between the payment summary and the ledger balance report?

The ledger balance report has no date filters, it shows all account balance.

The payment summary has date filters and unless you adjust the dates, some older outstanding invoices may not be included in the date selection.