We’ve added a bit more power to our recurring invoice module by allowing you to manipulate pricing on existing recurring invoices. Now you can easily increase or decrease specific invoice values as you renew existing contracts, or when those values change on a one-off basis.
To see the feature in action, please check out our feature video below.
This is cool and I actually stumbled upon this yesterday. However, I wish you could also change qty. I have bundled plans and I went it and edited one and was unable to change the qty, so I had to just add another line item of 1 in order to get where I needed. Price adjustment worked fine though.
Are you talking about just a standard item you are billing for on a recurring basis? This was really to address price changes for any of the dynamic counters that can be used for recurring invoicing (Assets, Employees, Remote Access Licenses, etc.).
While we are not yet using Syncro for invoicing, I can certainly see a need to adjust the quantity of recurring invoices.
Customer has 10 employees and each of them is on a managed support plan.
They pay monthly.
If the employee count increases from 10 to 11, the quantity needs to change on the recuring invoice.
BTW: In this situation, in a perfect world, one of the 12 invoices (1 per month) throughout the year would automatically include the Office 365 subscriptions (and each subscription SKU can have different renewal dates throughout the year).
We used to invoice almost all Office 365 subscriptions monthly, but with the introduction of NCE (and the tiny 3 day window to adjust a Office 365 subscription count), most of our customers now pay for Office 365 upfront annually.
Basically. And what @DBlue said.
In my case, I bill some things per device. Client got a new device that needed specific items which are an individual line item inside a bundled package made for them. They had 11, added one, so I had to add 1 additional line item to the bundled package instead of going to the existing line item that said 11, and just adjusting it to 12.
This is precisely how it works. You never have to change manual counts, that is why our billing system saves our partners so much time. If you increment or decrement assets or employees, it does all the counting for you at the time it fires. You should never have to do this kind of thing manually, at least with Syncro
What you might want to try is making products that define any given “package” that you have. Then adding a custom field to assets that reflects that “package,” and then you can bill against saved asset searches so those all become dynamic counts as well.
The other way to do it for customers like that is to bill against policy folders, with each folder representing a different package type.
Hmmm, interesting. Thanks @Andy
Ok, when we get around to implementing it will be interesting to see how it determines a increment or decrement then.
Some more thinking on this. @Andy
Getting back to the example of 10 employees.
If one employee is added to make 11, your saying that the recurring count for PC support plan would increase because a new device is added to the customer. Understood. 
What about the count for Office 365 backups?
Lets say 3 employees get Office 365 email backup and 7 do not.
New employee brings the total employee count to 11. The new employee needs Office 365 email backup.
How would we change the qty of Office 365 email backup from 3 to 4 in the monthly recurring invoice?
Depends on how you have it configured. Like if you get your licenses from Pax8, using that integration all of that stuff syncs over for the dynamic counts as well. If you are buying licenses elsewhere, you are most likely deploying that stuff through scripting in policies. So there you’d have your different “packages” defined by policies attached to policy folders. We have dynamic counters for policy folders too.
I would start playing with it when you get the chance. There isn’t too many scenarios you can dynamically bill for out of the gate, and for those that don’t qualify you can almost always handle them with custom fields, saved asset searches, and dynamically billing against those.
No, we do not use Pax8.
We purchase subscriptions like Office 365, or Veeam for Office 365 from various Australian official vendor distributors of Microsoft or Veeam.
Veeam Office 365 backup doesn’t have any deployment on the end point. It is cloud to cloud backup. no scripting in policies required.
For Office 365 backups, we have tiered storage pricing too.
Ahhh…sounds like quanities in recurring invoices can be driven by custom fields.
Sounds all very bespoke to manage and report on, but I’m starting to understand that at least automating the changes to the quantities in the recurring invoices is possible in Syncro.
This is another one of those things that seem really simple for Syncro to accomplish…just make the qty field editable, just like you made the price field. The foundation for recalculating is clearly already there, I can’t imagine it would be hard to make that change, but it seems again we are being told to do some other workaround when those workarounds don’t fit every scenario and just having the ability to adjust a qty seems like a very simple and yet super flexible solution.
But I digress. I will simply add another line item when needed as that is much faster and easier than creating custom fields for everything.
@mgiordano
yeah, I’m kind of dreading trying to maintain a horde of bespoke custom fields, that are not easily visable at the high level customer view. And what happens if a custom field is accidently deleted, or in the contact a custom field is mistakenly set to the wrong value. There is no auditing of custom fields when they were last changed let alone who changed them.
Maybe it will turn out all ok and I am fretting over nothing.
I’d much prefer the ability to specify a service as a non hardware billable item, then in the contact view pick which services are provided to that contact (with auditing), and easily see the sum totals of each at the customer level.
That’s not how it would really work at scale. I’d try and adopt the recurring invoice flow first and then try to find where you land deficiency-wise. You normally wouldn’t attach licenses or products to customers in this way, though you could configure customer prices an allow and deny lists for products through attaching contracts. Without dynamic counting, as you scale you’ll just bleed a shitload of lost time to doing counts manually, and chasing paperwork errors after incremented/decremented license counts. This is such a huge problem in the MSP space you’re even seeing entire platforms spun up (like Gradient) to discover lost revenue because so many PSAs can’t dynamically bill well (or at all).
This thread is opening my eyes on some of the dynamic counting power — I didn’t realize you could use a custom field of policy folders. @Andy — are there any training videos or deep dive documentation that shows all of the features here?
I think we’d need to update those for sure.
Something that would be great to have that I don’t think that exists would be being able to have a line item based on an other lines or multiple line quantities.
For example we have an email security licence which is not automated like Pax8. But is Microsoft 365 business premium licence qty + exchange online qty = email security quantity.
We get charged based on expanding usage at the vendor but we often forget to update the non automatic values such as these
Can you elaborate here? What is the primary line item you’d be basing this license count off of?
In my example the Primary would be a sum of two other quantities (but could equally be a singular line item)
Our primary would be the sum of quantity of both the Microsoft 365 Business premium AND exchange online plan 1.
Which would then equal the quantity of the Email Security in the example provided.
In my case, Pax8 syncronise office 365 licence usage. But do not supply my email security and the email security vendor doesn’t offer a syncronise to the values have to be updated manually.
Ok in your example for things that don’t sync automatically you could add custom fields to checkboxes for those items, and then add a contact counter and reference that custom field.