Printing Dues Invoices
The three-step process for printing dues invoices is now available in AM.NET. The process is identical to AM4’s. In AM.NET, you will find the three routines for printing dues invoices in Dues Routines > Invoice Process. To open the Dues Routines dashboard, click Routines in the Dues section of the main button bar.

If you are interested in using AM.NET to print your society’s dues invoices, please contact CDS. We must create a custom report layout specific to your society’s dues invoice.

The Invoice Process category contains three routines--or steps in the invoice process--that create, print, and archive dues invoices. Let's examine each of these routines and see how they relate to creating and tracking dues invoices.

Step 1: Create a new invoice print file
To better control the printing process and to enable historical tracking, you must print dues invoices out of a temporary print file rather than directly from the Dues Ledger file. Printing from a temporary file eliminates any problems arising from changed data, facilitates historical tracking, and allows users more control over the dues invoice process.

Note
No printed output results from this routine.

Step 2: Print original invoices from print file
This routine prints original invoices for a group of members. The term original simply designates these invoices from any subsequent duplicate invoices printed using the Print duplicate invoice(s) routine, and you can generate original invoices for second, third, and final notices.

Use this routine to print the invoices from the print file you created in step one. You can print this file as many times as you need to, generating original invoices for second, third, or final notices.

Each time you want to recreate the print file:

• Archive the records from the current invoice file.
• Return to step one and recreate the invoice print file.
• Redo step 2: Print original invoices from print file.

This will recreate the print file using updated data from the dues ledger file. Depending on what you selected in step one, the extracted file can exclude anyone without a dues balance so they will not receive an invoice. Each time you recreate the file, you will gather more recent data for the newest invoice run. To help you, AM4 provides 10 types of criteria when creating the invoice print file.

Notes
CDS customizes all dues invoices to the specific requirements of each society.

In the default setups for the Dues module, the user may specify three different messages that will appear on the first, second, and subsequent invoices.

Step 3: Archive records from current invoice file
After printing invoices, you can retain a permanent by copying selected summary data from the current print file to two archive files.

The first – the summary archive – contains one record for each invoice batch. It tells how many invoices printed on a certain date and the total amount invoiced.

The second – the detail archive – contains one record for each corresponding record in the previously current print file, saving each person's ID number, name, amount invoiced, and a few other statistically important items such as Billing Class.

Note
You cannot create a new invoice print file until you archive the previous one. If there are serious errors in the invoice data, you can also delete the print file using the Delete dues invoice data.