Ad-hoc Charges
Some work doesn't fit a monthly subscription: a call-out billed per dispatch, a run to a cellphone tower priced by distance band, standby for a breakdown billed by the hour. Ad-hoc charges is the ledger for that work — every billable event is logged as a pending charge, and money only reaches an invoice when a person sends it there. Nothing on this screen is ever invoiced automatically.
Find it under Billing → Invoices → Ad-hoc charges (the view toggle above the invoice list).
The flow
- Log — anyone on the control room can log a charge as it happens (operators included). Pick the customer and site, and the site's rate card prefills the price; everything stays editable. Charges can also arrive automatically — see below.
- Review — the To invoice view lists pending charges for the chosen period (defaults to the last 7 days), grouped per customer with a subtotal per group.
- Invoice — tick the charges to bill and click Create draft invoices. One draft invoice is created per customer — not per charge — with a line per charge, each stamped with its site and date. Only a billing manager can do this step; everyone else sees the list but not the button. The drafts appear under the Invoices view, where they get their invoice number when issued.
- History — invoiced and dismissed charges never leave the ledger. The History view is the permanent per-dispatch record, each row showing which invoice took it.
A charge that should never bill (a goodwill call, a duplicate) is dismissed — it stays in History marked as such.
Rate cards
The Rates view holds the pricing setup:
- Per dispatch — a flat price per call-out.
- Distance bands — a table of bands (e.g. 0–10 km, 11–20 km …) each with its own price. Used for cellphone-tower reaction: a tower's distance from base never changes, so its band is pinned once on its assignment and every charge prices itself — no live distance lookup.
- Per km — a rate per kilometre; the person logging enters the kilometres.
- Hourly — a first-hour price plus a per-hour-thereafter price. Hours round up to the card's step (15/30/60 minutes, default 30). A stint past the first hour saves as two rows — "first hour" and "N h thereafter" — matching how these have always appeared on invoices.
Under Who is on which card, a card is assigned to a site (with its pinned band and an optional per-site price override — "site A is R500 per dispatch, site B R750") or to a whole customer when the premises isn't a monitored site. When a charge is logged, the site's assignment wins; the customer's is the fallback; with neither, the price is simply typed by hand. Edit on an assignment opens it; Remove assignment is in the Danger zone at the bottom of that dialog — charges already logged keep their price.
Rate-card and charge prices are stored VAT-exclusive, like every other price in Billing; the invoice adds VAT at the issuing entity's rate. What you see and type follows the control room's VAT display setting.
Auto-capture from dispatches
When the control room dispatches through CleverCommand, a completed dispatch to a site (or customer) that has a rate assignment writes its own pending charge — no re-keying. These rows carry a small auto tag next to their type. The charge bills the customer the assignment names; a site assignment that names none bills the site's customer, but only a customer of your control room — on a site you share with another control room that is on their customer, such a dispatch captures nothing. Pricing at capture:
- Per dispatch — the assignment's override, else the card price.
- Distance band — the band pinned on the site's assignment. If no band is pinned, a R0 charge marked "band not pinned, price needed" appears so the work surfaces for pricing instead of silently going unbilled.
- Per km — kilometres are taken from the dispatch's road-distance estimate only when a real routed distance exists; otherwise a R0 "km needed" row appears for the reviewer to complete.
- Hourly — time on site (arrival to completion) rounded up to the card's step, minimum the first hour, saved as the same first-hour + thereafter rows the manual form writes.
Auto-capture only ever captures — captured charges sit pending behind the same review gate, and a dispatch is never blocked by billing: if anything about capture fails, the dispatch completes normally and no charge is written.
The weekly report as a file
Export CSV (next to Log a charge) downloads exactly what the current view and date filter show — date, customer, site, description, type, quantity, amounts, status and invoice number — for sending on or reconciling. The draft invoice itself remains the itemised statement the client receives.
Fixed monthly + ad-hoc on the same client
A customer can carry monthly subscriptions and ad-hoc charges — they are separate records that meet only on invoices. The monthly run keeps billing the subscriptions; the ad-hoc ledger bills the exceptions, weekly or whenever there is something to bill.