Billing Automation
Conductly can run your billing for you: it creates invoices on your schedule, emails them to families a few days ahead of time, and charges saved cards on the day you choose. This page explains what happens, when it happens, and which settings control it.
Billing automation is available to every school, but it starts off. Everything on this page is controlled from the automation panels at the bottom of Settings → Invoices — turn on what you want, when you want. Until you do, invoicing works exactly as described in Creating Invoices and Sending Invoices — you create, send, and charge yourself.
The big picture
Think of automation as two workers who each make one pass every day:
- The Invoice Creator — writes up new invoices when it's time.
- The Bill Collector — emails those invoices to families and charges saved cards when the day arrives.
They're deliberately separate: the Creator never touches money, and the Collector never decides what a family owes. Both run automatically once a day.
Part 1: The Invoice Creator
The Creator makes invoices in two situations.
Recurring invoices (monthly, quarterly, or semester billing)
If you've turned on Auto-generate recurring invoices, then each billing period Conductly builds an invoice for every enrolled student, based on their lessons and rates — the same invoice you'd get by creating it yourself from the Create Invoice drawer.
You control the timing in Settings → Invoices:
- Billing Period — Monthly, Quarterly, or Semester.
- Billing Start Day — the day of the month your billing cycle begins (for most schools, the 1st).
- Generate invoices days ahead — how many days before the period starts the invoices are created. This is your review window (more on that below).
Lesson pack renewals
Lesson packs (e.g., "10 lessons for $500") don't follow the calendar — they renew based on usage. Each day, Conductly checks every active pack and counts how many lessons are left. When a pack drops to your renewal threshold (Renew when lessons remain), one of two things happens, depending on your When a pack runs low setting:
- Auto-bill the next pack — Conductly immediately creates the invoice for the next pack.
- Flag staff to renew (the default) — Conductly notifies your staff that the pack is running low, and a staff member clicks Renew pack when ready.
Every new invoice starts as a Draft
No matter how it was created, an automatic invoice starts life as a Draft. Drafts are only visible to your staff — families cannot see them, and nothing can be charged yet. Check the Recent activity panel any time to confirm a batch was created.
The draft stage is your safety window: you can open any invoice, adjust it, add a discount, or delete it entirely before a family ever sees it. If everything looks right, you don't have to do anything — the Bill Collector takes it from there. See Invoice Statuses for what each status means.
If you use Finalize Invoice on an automatic draft instead of leaving it for its scheduled send day, Conductly does not email it for you — finalizing and sending are different steps, and only the Collector's own send step does both together. The invoice sits as Open, visible to staff only, and won't be auto-charged either — Conductly never charges an invoice it hasn't sent. It stays this way (logged in Recent activity as never sent) until you send it yourself with Send Invoice.
Part 2: The Bill Collector
Every day, the Collector looks at each automatic invoice and asks two questions, using dates you control in Settings → Invoices.
"Is it time to send this invoice?"
Every invoice has a due date (the billing start day plus your Payment due days setting). A set number of days before the due date — your Send invoices (days before due) setting — the invoice is sent: it moves to Waiting for payment, the family receives it by email, and it appears in their Family Portal. The email a family gets depends on whether they have a card on file:
- Card on file — a payment notice: "your saved payment method will be charged on [the charge day]," including the exact amount (with any card fee).
- No card on file — the invoice with a payment link — one click to view and pay online, no sign-in needed.
Each day's send is logged in Recent activity, including how many went out.
Example: due on the 1st, send 3 days ahead → families get their invoice email on the 29th.
"Is it time to charge this invoice?"
If your collection mode is Send & charge automatically, then on the charge day — the due date, or a set number of days after it (Charge cards (days after due)) if you prefer a grace period — Conductly charges the family's saved default card for the invoice balance.
Rules the Collector always follows:
- It never charges an invoice the family hasn't received. Sending always comes first: by the time a card is charged, the family has had the invoice email — and if they have a card on file, that email named the charge date and the exact amount. This holds even for an invoice finalized by hand rather than sent by the Collector — see the review window note above.
- No saved card? No problem. The family still gets the invoice email with a payment link and can pay online, or in person.
- It charges exactly once. If a card is declined, Conductly does not silently retry day after day. The invoice stays unpaid, the normal overdue flow takes over, and your staff is notified through the regular overdue-invoice notifications so a human can follow up. The one exception: if the family updates their payment method afterward, Conductly retries right away -- see Common questions below.
- It never touches finished invoices. Paid, voided, or refunded invoices are left alone. If a family already paid part of an invoice, only the remaining balance is charged.
Pausing collection on one invoice
Sometimes you need to work on an automatic invoice — fix a line item, add a discount — without the Collector emailing or charging it out from under you while you do. Open the invoice: if it's marked for automatic collection, you'll see a status message near the top explaining what will happen and when, with a Pause automatic collection button next to it.
Pausing stops the Collector from touching that one invoice — it won't be emailed or charged until you turn it back on. Nothing else about the invoice changes: its due date stays put, and clicking Turn automatic collection on puts it right back on the same send/charge schedule, as if it had never been paused. A paused invoice also shows a Paused marker in the Invoices list, so you can spot one at a glance.
The pause button only appears while there's still collection ahead of the invoice — a Draft, or an unpaid Open, Waiting for payment, or Overdue invoice with a due date. A Paid, Voided, or Refunded invoice has nothing left for the Collector to do, so there's nothing to pause.
Recent activity
Once Auto-generate recurring invoices is on, a Recent activity panel appears at the bottom of Settings → Invoices, below the automation controls. It lists the last 5 automation runs — each labeled Invoices generated (the Creator) or Invoices sent & charged (the Collector) — plus the date of the next scheduled generation. Check it any time you want to confirm a run happened and what it did; automation runs don't send a separate staff notification the way a manually created or sent invoice might.
Each run shows only the counts that apply to it: how many invoices were created, sent, charged, sent but left without a saved card (not a failure — that family still got an emailed payment link), never sent because a staff member finalized the draft by hand before the automatic send could go out, or failed to charge. A run with nothing to do shows "No invoices affected."
Most rows show in grey. A row turns amber — worth a look — when:
- A generation run created zero invoices, shown as "No invoices created." This is the case most worth catching, since an empty run otherwise looks identical to a normal one.
- Any invoices in the run failed to charge.
- Any invoices were never sent because they were finalized by hand.
Running collection right now
Don't want to wait for tonight's run? Open the ⋯ menu next to the Invoices heading on the Invoices list and click Collect Invoices. It runs the same Collector pass immediately: sending any invoice that has reached its send day, then charging saved cards for any invoice that has reached its charge day — the same rules as the nightly run, just not waiting for tonight.
The run happens in the background, so nothing on the page changes right away. Check Recent activity for the results — it's logged as Invoices sent & charged (run by hand), so you can tell it apart from the automatic nightly run. It's safe to click any time, even after tonight's run has already happened: it only acts on invoices that are still due today and haven't been sent or charged yet, so it can't double-send or double-charge anything.
Collect Invoices only appears once your collection mode is Send invoices automatically or Send & charge automatically. With collection mode Off — collect manually, there's nothing for it to run, so the option isn't offered.
The controls
Two settings in Settings → Invoices control the Collector:
- Auto-generate recurring invoices (on/off) — whether the Creator builds draft invoices each billing period.
- Collection mode — what the Bill Collector does with them:
| Collection mode | What it does |
|---|---|
| Off — collect manually | Your staff sends invoices and charges cards by hand |
| Send invoices automatically | Invoices are emailed to families on their send day; your staff charges cards |
| Send & charge automatically | Invoices are emailed on their send day, then saved cards are charged on the charge day |
You can mix these however you like. Some schools generate drafts automatically but collect by hand; others let everything run and only step in when notified.
A month in the life (example)
A school bills Monthly, period starting the 1st, creates invoices 5 days early, invoices due on the 1st, sends 3 days before due, and charges on the due date. Auto-generate is on and collection mode is Send & charge automatically. Here's February's tuition:
| Date | What happens |
|---|---|
| Jan 27 | Invoice Creator builds draft invoices for February, logged in Recent activity as an "Invoices generated" run. |
| Jan 27–28 | Review window — staff can adjust or delete any draft. Families see nothing yet. |
| Jan 29 | Bill Collector sends the invoices. Card-on-file families get a "your card will be charged Feb 1" notice; everyone else gets the invoice with a payment link. Logged in Recent activity as an "Invoices sent & charged" run. |
| Feb 1 | Bill Collector charges every family with a saved card, logged in Recent activity as another "Invoices sent & charged" run with that day's totals. |
| Feb 1+ | Families without a saved card (or with a declined card) still have their open invoice, and Payment Reminders take over. |
Meanwhile, if a student's 10-lesson pack hits its renewal threshold on, say, Feb 12, its renewal invoice is created that day and rides the exact same send-then-charge rails, on its own due date — no waiting for March.
Common questions
Can I look over invoices before families see them? Yes — that's exactly what the Generate invoices days ahead setting is for. Invoices sit as staff-only drafts from the day they're created until their send day.
Will a family ever be charged without warning? No. In Send & charge automatically mode the invoice email always goes out first, on the send day — and for card-on-file families it names the charge date and the exact amount. Conductly never charges a family for an invoice they haven't received.
What happens when a card is declined? The charge is attempted once that day. The invoice stays unpaid, your staff is notified, and the overdue flow (including Payment Reminders, if enabled) goes to work. Staff can retry the card manually, or the family can pay from the emailed link or their portal. If the family instead updates their card -- through the emailed Update Payment Method link or from their portal -- Conductly automatically retries any invoice still owed from that decline the moment the new card is saved, and the confirmation page tells them whether each one went through. See Payments for how card charges, retries, and this automatic recharge work.
Does this affect invoices my staff creates by hand? No. Automatic sending and charging apply only to invoices the system created. Manually created invoices are sent and charged by your staff, as always — see Sending Invoices.
I finalized an automatic draft myself instead of waiting for it to send — what happens to it? It becomes an Open invoice, same as any finalized draft, but Conductly still won't send or charge it for you. Finalizing just unlocks it for sending — it doesn't send it. If your collection mode charges automatically, that invoice sits ready-but-unsent (shown in Recent activity as never sent) until you click Send Invoice yourself; only then does it become eligible for its next scheduled charge.
What if a family has no card on file? Their invoice is still created and emailed on schedule with a payment link; they just pay themselves — online, or however you normally accept payment.
How do I stop one invoice from sending or charging automatically? Open it and click Pause automatic collection — see Pausing collection on one invoice. This only affects that invoice; every other automatic invoice keeps running on schedule.