Billing Config
The Config tab on the Billing page (Billing → Config) is where you set up the reusable building blocks that the rest of billing draws on. Its sub-tabs are grouped into four sections — Money in (Banking, Card payments), Documents (Service agreement, Discounts, Departments), Automation (Suspensions), and Integrations (Accounting sync, Compare packages, Import / Export) — each managed on its own screen. (Reminder cadences used to live here too; they moved to Settings → Reminders so that customer reminders and internal fleet/compliance reminders are configured in one place. The old Reminders sub-tab now links there.) The selected sub-tab is kept in the URL (?tab=config&view=…), so a Config screen can be linked or bookmarked directly. Everything here is VCR-scoped and editable by users with the Manage billing permission; everyone else sees it read-only.
A permanent note on the Config tab points out that "VAT and company details are set in Company admin →" — that link opens Company admin → Billing, where VAT registration and the company identity fields live.
Banking (how customers pay you)
The Banking sub-tab holds your VCR's deposit accounts — the "how to pay" details customers see. Each account has a label, account holder, bank name, account number, branch code, account type, a reference hint (defaults to "Use your invoice number as the reference"), free-text instructions, and an Active toggle; multiple accounts can be ordered.
These details appear in three places: the PAYMENT / BANKING block on the invoice PDF (when the invoice's document template keeps the Banking details block on — the built-in look does — and the rest of the conditions under What the invoice PDF says about paying hold), the Pay tab of the customer account portal, and — if you switch it on — the Banking details panel on the quote PDF.
Also print banking details on quotes is a single checkbox on this sub-tab, off by default. A quote is a proposal rather than a demand for payment, and it gets forwarded around far more freely than an invoice, so most control rooms leave it off. Turn it on if your customers pay a deposit off an accepted quote: the quote then prints the same account an invoice for that customer would use, with the quote number as the reference. It applies to every quote in the control room — preview, download and emailed attachment alike — and needs the Manage billing permission to change.
This card previously lived under Payments → Payment proofs. It's configuration (not part of the proofs review queue), so it now lives with the rest of the billing config.
The default account, and routing accounts to specific invoices
If you bank into more than one account, mark one as the Default — the Make default button on the account row, or the Default deposit account checkbox when editing it. The default is what every invoice uses unless something more specific routes another account.
From most specific to least, an invoice's deposit account is resolved by:
- A manual pick on the invoice — the Pay into (deposit account) field on the invoice editor. Leave it on Auto to inherit.
- The subscription — Deposit account under Billing → Subscriptions → (subscription) → Pricing & cycle.
- The customer — Default deposit account on the customer's Billing account card. A customer setting beats the plan.
- The plan — Deposit account under Billing → Plans → (plan) → Classification & ledger.
- The default — the account flagged Default above (with several legal entities, the issuing entity's default — see below).
So you can bank Armed Response invoices into one account and Camera Monitoring into another (set on each plan), give one key customer their own account, override a single subscription, and still change a one-off invoice by hand — the more specific setting always wins. On a clubbed invoice (several plans on one document, see Invoices), a plan or subscription account is only used when every line agrees; otherwise it falls back to the customer or VCR default.
The account is worked out when the document is drawn, not frozen when the invoice was raised — so if you re-point a plan or replace an account, existing invoices show your current banking rather than a closed account.
Several legal entities: each account belongs to one
When a control room issues from more than one legal entity (Billing entities), a bank account is one company's, so every deposit account belongs to one entity:
- The account form gains a Billing entity field, and the list a Billing entity column, grouped with the default entity first.
- The Default is kept per entity. Make default (or the Default deposit account for … checkbox) only replaces the default of that account's own entity, so each company has its own.
- An account saved before you added a second entity belongs to the default entity until you edit it and choose another.
The cascade above still applies, but any account belonging to a different entity than the document is skipped, and the last step lands on the issuing entity's default — or, with none flagged, that entity's first account. A hand pick of another entity's account on an invoice is refused outright. On the plan, customer, subscription and invoice pickers every option names the entity it belongs to, so you can see which picks will print.
An invoice can never tell a customer to pay into the wrong company's bank account: if the issuing entity has no visible account of its own, the PAYMENT / BANKING block is left off rather than borrowed from another entity. The Banking sub-tab shows a warning naming any entity in that position — add an account for it, or edit an existing account and set its Billing entity.
Card payments (Yoco) and Netcash are per entity for the same reason: one card charge settles into one company's merchant account. Each invoice is paid on its own, into the Yoco account of the company that issued it — there is no combined payment across two companies.
Card payments (Yoco)
The Card payments sub-tab lets your customers pay their invoices online by card, with the money settling directly into your own Yoco account — CleverCam never touches the funds. It's separate from the bank-transfer details on the Banking tab and from Netcash debit orders; you can offer any combination.
Connecting your Yoco account
- Open Billing → Config → Card payments.
- Paste your Yoco secret key — in Yoco, find it under Sell online → Developers → API keys. It starts with
sk_live_(orsk_test_if you want to trial the flow without charging real cards). Optionally add an account label. - Click Connect Yoco.
CleverOps validates the key against Yoco and automatically registers a payment webhook on your Yoco account, so paid invoices reconcile without any dashboard setup on your side. There is nothing to copy into your Yoco dashboard — no webhook address, no callback URL. Once connected, the tab shows the account as Connected, whether it's in live or test mode, and the last four characters of the key.
Each legal entity connects its own Yoco account, because a card payment settles into exactly one merchant account. The tab shows one card per company, each with its own Connect button and its own status — so paste each company's key into its own card. With the Billing page set to All entities you see them all; scope the page to one company to see just that one.
An entity with no Yoco account connected simply has no Pay now button on its invoices. The other company's gateway is unaffected, and disconnecting one never touches the other.
The secret key is sent once over an encrypted connection and stored server-side; it is never shown again and CleverOps staff can't read it. Disconnect removes the webhook from your Yoco account and clears the stored key — existing payments are unaffected.
How customers pay
Once your Yoco account is connected, a Pay now button appears on every invoice you share via link (the public invoice page). The customer taps it, pays on Yoco's secure hosted page by card, and is returned to the invoice. When Yoco confirms the payment, CleverOps records a card payment against the invoice and closes the balance automatically.
If the company that issued the invoice has not connected a Yoco account, no Pay now button is shown — an invoice never charges into anyone's account but the issuing company's own.
A sk_test_ key connects and shows as Test mode, but the Pay now button stays hidden: a test key would send a real customer to a test checkout that declines their card. Reconnect with your sk_live_ key to take real payments and put the button on your invoices.
Accounting sync (Xero)
The Accounting sync sub-tab links this VCR's books to an accounting package — customers, invoices, payments, credit notes, inventory items and supplier bills stay in step automatically. Xero, Sage, QuickBooks Online, Zoho Books and FreshBooks are all live, on the same connection screen; a VCR links one at a time. It has its own page: see Accounting sync for the full walkthrough, and use its How it works button for a visual explainer you can show the team.
Departments / cost-centres
Departments let you group revenue by cost-centre (for example Armed Response, Camera Monitoring, Installations).
- Add / Edit — each department has a short code, a name, an optional description, and an Active toggle.
- Delete — click Edit, then Delete department in the Danger zone below the form. Removing a department leaves any plans or invoice lines that referenced it in place; they simply become untagged.
Tag a department onto a plan in Billing → Plans → (plan) → Classification & ledger → Department / cost-centre. New invoice lines created by the billing run can carry the department for reporting.
Discount templates
Discount templates are reusable named discounts you can apply directly to invoice lines and to subscriptions.
- Kind — Percent (a percentage from 0–100) or Fixed (a Rand amount).
- Add / Edit — give the discount a code, name, value, and an Active toggle.
Active templates appear in an Apply… picker next to the Disc % input on each invoice line. Choosing a percent template sets that line's Disc %; choosing a fixed-amount template adds a new negative line (Discount — <name>) so the invoice subtotal, VAT, and total net it off automatically. On a subscription the same picker sits under Discount (%) and applies percent templates only — fixed-amount templates are listed but disabled there, because a subscription discount is a percentage.
Invoice templates
Invoice templates have moved to Settings → Workspace → Documents. How an invoice looks — its layout and colours, which built-in blocks print and any blocks of your own — is now a document template, and the same template covers quotes, statements, credit notes and every other PDF the control room sends. Templates belong to an issuing billing entity; each entity has one default, and an invoice picks a template in the invoice form's Template field (an invoice raised from a quote starts with the quote's pick).
What the invoice template used to hold maps across like this:
| Was | Now |
|---|---|
| Footer note | The template's Closing note for invoices. It wins over the Invoice footer under Settings → Branding → Document footers on the invoices drawn with it; blank keeps the Branding note. |
| Show bank details | The Banking details built-in block, which a template can switch off for invoices. Switched on, the block still prints only when the invoice has a balance owing, an account resolves for it and carries a bank name or account number, and the customer is not on debit order. |
| Payment terms | Gone as free text. CleverOps words the closing sentence per invoice — "Please settle by <date>…" or the debit-order note. A template can switch the Payment terms block off for invoices and add a text block of its own after the body instead. |
| Accent colour | The template's colour — its own, or the entity's brand colour. |
Billing run
Under Automation → Billing run: the control room's billing policy, used by the monthly billing run.
- Billing day — a day of the month (1–31; 29–31 clamp to the last day of shorter months), or each subscription on its own date. With a billing day the whole book is invoiced on that day: a new subscription's first bill is moved onto it, the nightly run only runs on that day, and subscriptions off the day are caught up pro-rata once and snapped onto it. The helper text names the next billing day.
- Nightly run — Create a draft batch for review — a person issues it (drafts have no number and change nothing until issued; nothing reaches the accounting sync or reminders before issue), or Issue invoices automatically (the run numbers, dates and issues as it goes). Draft batches can always be created by hand.
- Batches — shown only with more than one billing entity: One batch for every billing entity (the default — each invoice still carries its own entity and number), or One batch per billing entity, where the nightly run makes a separate batch for each entity that is reviewed and issued on its own. A batch for a single entity can always be made by hand — see A batch per billing entity.
- Bills are for — the period ahead (in advance) or the period behind (in arrears); the helper text shows what the next bill's line will read ("October 2026"). A subscription can override this on its own row.
- Bill from — a date before which no invoice covers service, or empty for no floor. This is for an imported book: the subscriptions keep their real contract start dates, and this says where billing in CleverOps begins.
- Longest first bill — how far a first bill may reach back before its own period: the period only, or up to 24 months of catch-up. Default 3 months. A subscription reaching further back is treated as an imported book — its period is billed, its history is not, and the batch lists what it withheld under Review the batch.
- Bank file — which file Generate run builds for: Netcash batch file (the default; it submits directly once Netcash is connected), ABSA Online Collections (.trf) or Generic CSV. Choosing ABSA shows the ABSA user code (the file is named
CL‹code›.trf), the ABSA client name, the 20-character statement description debtors see, and the nominated account indicator (usually 01), and adds the month buttons and the batch-report import described under Debit-order collections.
The card also points out that a subscription's first bill covers the time from its start date to its first full period, with the partial start month handled by the First invoice policy under Onboarding → Settings, bounded by the two settings above.
A first bill covers everything from the subscription's start date onward. For a book imported with real historical start dates and no billing history in CleverOps, that is one invoice with a line per month going back years. Longest first bill defaults to 3 months so this is caught even on a control room nobody has configured, but Bill from is the setting that states the intent.
Suspension reasons
Suspension reasons are the choices offered when you suspend or close a billing account (see Account lifecycle).
- Defaults — a shared set of common reasons (non-payment, customer request, temporary hold, relocation, end of contract, …) is provided and shown read-only with a Default badge.
- Your own — add reasons specific to your control room with a code, label, optional description, a sort order, and an Active toggle.
- Requires a reactivation date — tick this on a reason (for example Temporary hold) to force a reactivation date to be entered whenever that reason is used to suspend an account.
Deleting a reason does not change past status-history rows — they keep the label that was recorded at the time.
Applying these to billing records
| Where | Field | Effect |
|---|---|---|
| Plans (plan form → Classification & ledger) | Department / cost-centre | Tags the plan for revenue grouping. |
| Subscriptions (subscription form → Pricing & cycle) | Discount (%) | A recurring percentage discount. The billing run applies it to every generated invoice line and records the percentage on the line. The subscription summary shows the discounted "per billing period" amount. |
| Invoices (invoice form → line items) | Disc % column | A per-line percentage discount. VAT is calculated on the discounted (net) amount, and the invoice totals reflect it. |
| Invoices (invoice form → Customer & dates) | Template | Selects the document template the PDF is drawn with. Defaults to the issuing entity's default template. |
Line discounts on invoices
Each invoice line item has a Disc % column between Unit price and VAT %. The unit price stays as the gross price; the discount reduces the line subtotal, VAT is charged on the discounted amount, and the discount is shown on the PDF line (e.g. (-10% · VAT 15%)).
The Apply… picker under the Disc % input applies a saved discount template: a percent template fills in that line's Disc %, while a fixed-amount template instead adds a separate negative line (Discount — <name>). The fixed discount line carries the same default VAT rate as a normal new line, so the reduction applies to the VAT base too and the totals stay balanced.
Subscription discounts
A subscription's Discount (%) is applied automatically by the monthly billing run: each generated invoice line is reduced by the discount, with the gross unit price and the discount percentage both recorded on the line. Existing subscriptions default to 0% (no change to their billing). The Apply a saved discount… picker under the field fills the percentage from a percent template; fixed-amount templates don't apply to a subscription and are shown disabled.