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 the order's billing cycle and the dates entered on the Generate Invoice dialog.

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Invoicing is one of two posting paths. If a Rental Order is linked to a Job, lines can also be posted as Job Planning Lines instead of (or alongside) a Sales Invoice. Both paths emit the same shapes: parent kit line plus non-billable component breakdown, period-aligned amounts, and the rental-specific fields. This document focuses on the Sales Invoice path; the Job Planning Lines path is structurally symmetric.

How invoicing works

The end-to-end shape of a single invoice run, from the user's perspective:

1
Trigger from a Rental Order

On the Rental Order, use Create Invoice. The Generate Invoice dialog opens, prefilled with the order's number and the Bill-to Customer.

2
Set the period and options

Confirm the Posting Date (when the invoice is recorded to the ledger) and the Invoice to Date (the cutoff for what to bill). Choose whether to Include Components on the invoice (relevant for kit lines).

3
The system calculates billable amounts

Each line on the Rental Order is examined. Lines that have shipped, not yet been fully invoiced, and are due to be billed by the Invoice to Date contribute a Term Amount based on Quantity, Unit Price, Price Term, and the period being billed. The period bills from the line's last Invoiced to Date up to the dialog's Invoice to Date; for monthly Billing Cycles, the boundary snaps to the end of the calendar month (the EOM-snap behaviour).

4
A Sales Invoice is generated

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.

5
Review and post

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.

Generate Invoice
Rental Order No.
The Rental Order being invoiced. Read-only; populated automatically from the order you triggered the dialog from.
Bill-to Customer No.
The customer the invoice will be raised against. Read-only; inherited from the Rental Order's Bill-to Customer.
Posting Daterequired
The date the invoice is recorded to the ledger. Defaults to the work date.
Invoice to Daterequired
The cutoff date for what to bill. Lines are billed for the period from their last Invoiced to Date up to this date. For monthly Billing Cycles the boundary snaps to the end of the calendar month, so a run with Invoice to Date set to (say) the 28th still bills the full month.
Include Components
When ticked, kit component lines appear on the invoice as a non-billable breakdown beneath the parent Kit line, so the customer can see what's in each kit. When unticked, only the parent Kit line shows.

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.

Generate Invoices (batch)
Posting Daterequired
The date all generated invoices are recorded to the ledger. The same date applies to every invoice in the batch.
Invoice to Daterequired
The cutoff date for what to bill across every order in the batch.
Include Components
As above; applies to every invoice in the batch.

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)

Sales Invoice (header)
Linked to Rental Order
Shows which Rental Order this Sales Invoice was generated from. Click through to navigate back to the originating Rental Order.

Lines (Sales Invoice subform)

Sales Invoice Lines
Rental from Date
The first day of the rental period this line covers. The customer sees the start of the billing window directly on the line.
Rental to Date
The last day of the rental period this line covers. The window closes on this date.
MultiRate Category
If the originating rental line was priced from a multi-rate band, this records which category was used. Useful for the customer to verify the rate they were charged.
Rental Quantity
The quantity of the rental item being billed in this line, distinct from the standard Quantity column (which is the quantity multiplier on the Sales Invoice line).
Rental Periods
The number of rental periods billed in this segment, in the unit set by the Price Term Code (for example 2 where two weeks are billed at a weekly term). Lets the customer see how the line amount was arrived at.
Non-Working Days
The number of non-working days within the billing period that were excluded from the calculation. Visible so the customer can confirm weekends and holidays were correctly factored out (where the line's Base Calendar Code says they should be).
Price Term Code
The Price Term (Day, Week, Month, Quarter, Year) the line was billed at, so the unit of pricing is unambiguous on the invoice.

Rental fields on the Posted Sales Invoice

After the Sales Invoice is posted, the same rental fields appear on the Posted Sales Invoice's lines (Rental from Date, Rental to Date, MultiRate Category, Rental Quantity). These travel with the posted document for permanent record-keeping.

Walkthrough: how kit lines appear on a Sales Invoice

When a Rental Order has Kit lines that have shipped, the invoice can show them in two shapes depending on the Include Components setting on the dialog:

1
Include Components ticked: parent + breakdown

The parent Kit line appears with the Kit's price (the kit-managed price). Below it, each component line appears indented and marked Non-Billable, so the customer can see what's in the kit but is only charged for the parent. This is the typical shape for invoicing where the customer wants to see what they're getting.

2
Include Components unticked: parent only

Only the parent Kit line appears, with the kit's price. Component lines are not added to the invoice. Use when the customer doesn't need (or shouldn't see) the kit's internal composition.

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Kit pricing is the kit's own price, regardless of components. Component-level discounts on the Rental Price List are not applied when items ship as part of a kit. The kit's total price is what's billed; the components on the invoice are illustrative only.

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.

1
Configure the factors on the kit master

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.

2
A kit line is invoiced

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.

3
Ledger fan-out splits the segment across components

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.

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Kit vs Components Price Method. The fan-out described here only happens when the parent kit line's snapshot Price Method is Kit (kit-managed pricing). Under Components Price Method, components are separately billed lines in their own right and generate their own ledger entries via the standard rental-line path; Kit Price Factor doesn't apply.

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.

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