Recurring invoicing for monthly invoices

Hi,

My use case is as follows:

In my School, Students are billed in a per Class taken fashion. The fee may vary from one Class to another, depending on the Course the Class belongs to.
Some students take one Class per year, and some others take two or more Classes. There is no pre-defined grouping for this.
For Students who take more than one Class, all the Classes should be added to the same invoice.

Now …
From what I’ve seen so far, Gibbon requires that you generate invoices manually from scratch every month (cycle). Please correct me if I’m wrong (I strongly wish I were wrong :smiley: )
If your invoices match any of the pre-defined groupings, Class or Form Group, you can generate many invoices at once. Still you have to select what fee to include in these invoices.
Otherwise, you have to manually build the invoice for each student each time, in order to select what fees you will include in the invoice.

For students that are taking the same Class and only that Class, I can select them together and generate all the invoices at once.
But if students are taking the same Class and also other Classes, this is not going to work, and I will end up generating the invoices one by one, for each student, each month.
This will certainly become a very heavy and error-prone task.

I believe the best solution would be to associate what fees apply to which Student, and generate the invoice based on that, without having to specify the fees every time, because the most common scenario is that a Student keeps the same Classes throughout the whole year or whatever academic period your school works with. Then you just have to select which students you want to generate the invoice for, and the system will already know what fees to apply to each student.
This, and the possibility of selectively adding one-off ad-hoc fees (which is currently available in Gibbon) will be the perfect solution.

Is there a reasonable way to solve this scenario at present? and avoid the need to generate invoices every single time.

Thank you!!
Warm regards
Ricardo

Hi Ricardo,

As you’ve discovered in exploring the Finance capabilities of Gibbon, it was definitely designed with a yearly billing schedule in mind, as this is what the school where Gibbon was created uses, along with many other international schools. In this way, there are no automated tools for generating recurring invoices, as the fees could change for students from year to year. As you may have also noticed, the Finance module is not a full-fledged set of billing and invoicing functionality, as Gibbon can only go so far to replicate every piece of software a school needs, but it does have some basic functionality that will be enough for many schools.

Since Gibbon is open source, we welcome contributions from developers. If new features fit within the core we will add them into the next release using Pull Requests from GitHub. Otherwise, they can be added as additional modules, to augment the core functionality of Gibbon. You’ll see many such modules on the Extend page. Another option, in some cases, is to use the Commands feature of the Query Builder, which can run database changes given a set of variables, but does require a good knowledge of SQL and the database to create new commands.

Since the functionality you’re looking for is not already part of the core, and unfortunately we don’t have the developer capacity to add a feature of this scale to our roadmap, the best bet is to look for a developer either within your school or on a contract basis to make these changes for you. We’re happy to offer guidance and advice to developers who are interested in extending the functionality of Gibbon.

Hope this helps, I know it’s not the instant solution you may have been hoping for, but as an open source project, luckily the possibility is still there.