Rental Invoice
How rental invoicing works in Essential Rental: a dialog you run from a Rental Order, the Sales Invoice it produces, and the rental-specific fields that travel with it.
How it fits in
Invoicing is where money meets the document flow. The Rental Order says what's been agreed and what's been shipped; an invoice converts that into a billable amount the customer sees on their statement.
There is no separate "Rental Invoice" document type. The invoice that gets generated is a standard Business Central Sales Invoice; what makes it a rental invoice is that it was generated by the rental invoicing flow and carries rental-specific fields (Linked to Rental Order, Rental From Date, Rental To Date, MultiRate Category, Rental Quantity, Price Term Code) injected onto it by Essential Rental.
A Rental Order can produce many invoices over its lifetime; that's the point of a billing cycle. Each invoice covers a slice of time (a week, a month, a quarter), with the period boundaries calculated from each line's billing cycle and the Posting Date entered on the Generate Invoice dialog.
How invoicing works
The end-to-end shape of a single invoice run, from the user's perspective:
On the Rental Order, use Create Invoice. The Generate Invoice dialog opens, prefilled with the order's number and the Bill-to Customer.
Confirm the Posting Date: the date the invoice is recorded to the ledger, and the date that decides which billing periods are due. There is nothing else to set. How far each line bills comes from its own billing cycle, and whether a kit's components appear on the invoice comes from the kit's Kit Invoice Method.
Each line on the Rental Order is examined. Lines that have shipped, have not yet been fully invoiced, and are due by the Posting Date contribute an amount based on Quantity, Unit Price, Price Term, and the period being billed. Each line bills its own billing period, from the day after its Invoiced to Date (or from its Rental Start Date on a first invoice) to the end of that period, and never past its own Rental End Date. A billing cycle whose Period Basis is Calendar ends its periods on the calendar boundary (a monthly cycle ends on the last day of the month); one on Anniversary counts its periods from the start date. An In Arrears period is due once it has ended by the Posting Date; an In Advance period is due from the billing cycle's Days in Advance before it starts (the day before, when that is left blank). Whether one run bills a single period or every period that is due follows the customer's Billing Catch-Up, or Default Billing Catch-Up on Rental Setup.
A standard BC Sales Invoice is created, populated with the calculated lines and tagged with the rental fields. Each rental line on the invoice carries Rental From Date, Rental To Date, MultiRate Category, Rental Quantity, Non-Working Days, and Price Term Code so the customer can see exactly what period and quantity each charge covers.
The Sales Invoice opens in its standard BC card. Review the lines, make any final adjustments, then Post it as you would any other Sales Invoice. Posting updates the originating Rental Lines' Invoiced to Date, so the next invoice run picks up where this one left off.
The Generate Invoice dialog
The wizard you run from a single Rental Order's Create Invoice action.
The Generate Invoices batch dialog
The batch variant, run from the Rental Orders list. Lets you generate invoices for many Rental Orders in a single run, useful for monthly or end-of-period invoice runs across the customer base.
Posting Date is the only thing the dialog asks for. It has no Include Components option: whether a kit's components appear on the invoice follows each kit's Kit Invoice Method (see how kit lines appear on a Sales Invoice).
The batch operates on whatever set of Rental Orders you've prepared on the list before running it. Two ways to prepare the set:
Filter only: apply filters on the Rental Orders list (typically by Customer, Billing Cycle, or by status flags marking orders that are due to be billed). Then run the invoice action from the list's ribbon: every order matching the filter is processed.
Filter then select: apply filters to narrow the list to a candidate set, then multi-select the specific orders you want to process within that filtered view. Run the invoice action: only the selected orders are processed. Useful when the filter gives you a candidate batch but you want to skip a few of them this run.
Rental fields on the Sales Invoice
A standard BC Sales Invoice generated by the rental invoicing flow has rental-specific fields added by Essential Rental: one on the header, seven on the lines.
Header (Sales Invoice card)
Lines (Sales Invoice subform)
Rental fields on the Posted Sales Invoice
After the Sales Invoice is posted, four of the rental fields appear on the Posted Sales Invoice's lines: Rental Quantity next to Quantity, as before posting, and Rental from Date, Rental to Date and MultiRate Category after Line Amount. These travel with the posted document for permanent record-keeping. Non-Working Days and Price Term Code are not shown on the posted lines.
Walkthrough: how kit lines appear on a Sales Invoice
How a shipped kit shows on the invoice is decided by the kit's Invoice Method on the Rental Kit card, which the order line carries as Kit Invoice Method. Nothing on the invoice dialogs changes it. For a kit that carries the price itself, there are two shapes:
The kit line appears with the kit's price. Below it come a line reading Includes: and a text line for each component, with no quantity or amount, so the customer can see what is in the kit but is charged for the kit only. This is the shape to use where the customer wants to see what they're getting.
Only the kit line appears, with the kit's price. No component lines are added to the invoice. Use it when the customer doesn't need (or shouldn't see) what is inside the kit.
A kit whose Invoice Method is Components or Components (Summarised) is laid out differently, because its components carry the price. The invoice shows a heading line reading Kit: with the kit's number and description, and no amount, followed by the billed lines. Under Components there is a line for each component, and for a Pooled kit a line for each unit. Under Components (Summarised), which is for Pooled kits, units of the same type on the same dates and price share one line, with the number of units in Rental Quantity. A component is only billed once it has shipped, and drops off once it has been billed to the end. See Rental Kits for the rules.
Kit Price Factor and the Rental Ledger
The customer-facing invoice shows a kit at the kit's own price. Internally, that revenue still needs to be apportioned across the underlying Rental Items so utilisation reporting at the asset level reflects what actually generated the income. Kit Price Factor is the mechanism that does this.
Each component line on a Kit's master record (set up on the Rental Kit page) carries a Kit Price Factor: a decimal between 0 and 1 that says what proportion of the kit's per-period revenue this component should be credited with in the Rental Ledger. The factors across all components of a kit must sum to 1 or less.
When the parent kit line is invoiced under Price Method = Kit, the rental ledger fan-out runs: each component gets a Rental Ledger Entry with Sales Amount = SegmentTotalAmount × Kit Price Factor, and trace fields (Kit Parent Rental Line No. and Kit Component Line No.) link the entries back to the source kit so reporting can roll them up.
On the Rental Kit page, set Kit Price Factor on each component line. You can either set them by hand, or use the Calculate Kit Factors From Component Prices action to auto-populate based on each component's current rental-list price as a proportion of the total. Components without a rental-list price are left at their current factor and surfaced in a message for you to address manually.
When the kit's parent rental line goes through invoicing for a billing segment, the segment's total amount is calculated as normal (Quantity, Unit Price, Price Term, period). That total is what the customer sees and what gets billed.
Behind the scenes, the segment total is multiplied by each component's Kit Price Factor, and one Rental Ledger Entry per component is created. A factor of 0.4 against a £100 segment becomes a £40 ledger entry against that component's underlying Rental Item; reporting groups these back to the kit via the trace fields.
Credit memos and the Rental Ledger
When you correct a posted rental invoice with a credit memo, Essential Rental writes a reversing Rental Ledger Entry for each rental line on the credit memo: the exact negative of the original entry's quantity and amount. This keeps the ledger and your rental revenue reporting straight, rather than leaving the original revenue counted twice. Kit fan-out reverses the same way, one negative entry per component.
The reversal applies to a credit memo created from a posted sales invoice (including the system-created one) and to a manual credit memo populated with Get Source Document from the posted invoice. It touches the ledger only: the rental line's own billing state (Invoiced to Date, line status) is left as it was, so the credit memo does not on its own re-open a line for billing.
Related pages
- Rental Quote: where the document flow starts.
- Rental Order: the source for invoicing; Create Invoice lives here.
- Rental Shipment: shipping is what makes a line eligible for invoicing.
- Rental Return: what happens at the end of the rental period.
- Rental Setup: Billing Cycle defaults, Invoice Discount Method, Rental Discount G/L Account, posting groups, No. Series.
- Rental Price Lists (coming soon): where the rates that drive invoice line amounts come from.