Close the billing period

Close the billing period

Decide how your syndicate treats a fresh charge — quietly building up until you say otherwise, or due the moment it lands — and issue the month’s bill when you’re ready.

Before you start

• You need an admin role in the syndicate (treasurer counts as admin).
• Open the Admin tab, tap Payments, then tap Billing.

Choose when charges become due

Every syndicate has a billing due mode, set on the Billing screen:

• At close (the default for a new syndicate). Charges — usage, event fees, periodic dues, manual adjustments — accrue quietly through the period. A member can always pay one off early by card, but nothing is chased and Direct Debit leaves it alone until you close the period.
• On finalisation. Each charge is due the instant it’s raised — pay-as-you-go. Closing the period has nothing left to do for these charges; it exists for the syndicates that still issue occasional cash calls or catch-up charges outside the normal flow.

Cash calls are unaffected by this setting either way: a cash call always carries its own due date, set when you issue it (see issue a cash call).

To change the mode, open the dropdown under When charges become due and pick the option you want. The change saves immediately and only affects charges created from that point on — nothing already on the ledger is touched.

Make balances due

“Finalise” now means one thing only — turning a flown booking into charges. Issuing the month’s bill is a separate action, Make balances due, so the two are never confused.

1. On Billing, scroll to Billing period.
2. Tap Make balances due.
3. Review the preview: how many charges are about to be marked due, how many members will be collected by Direct Debit and the total (and how many working days from now that collection falls), how many are held up behind an unresolved Direct Debit collection of their own and the total, how many members will be left due for you to chase manually and the total, and — if any bookings from before now are still awaiting finalisation — a count of those too.
4. Tap Make balances due to confirm.

Once confirmed:

• Every charge that was still accruing and still owed becomes due; one a member has already paid off by card is left as it is.
• Any member with an active Direct Debit mandate and a due balance is picked up by the nightly Direct Debit run once the card-payment delay has passed — see collect by Direct Debit. No second button and no extra step: the charges became due, so Direct Debit takes them.
• A member whose previous Direct Debit collection has not resolved yet is counted separately, and is neither collected nor yours to chase. Only one collection per member can be outstanding at a time, so nothing further is taken from them until that one clears — after which their balance goes out on the next run like anyone else’s. See collect by Direct Debit.
• Everyone else with a due balance is told straight away, with a “Balance now due” notification naming the amount that repeats weekly while it stays unpaid, but collecting it is left for you to follow up with directly (a card payment, a bank transfer, or however your syndicate settles up). Recording an outside payment only applies when the member actually owes something: a balance that nets to zero (or to credit) needs nothing recorded, so the option isn’t offered for it.

Running Make balances due again is always safe — a charge that’s already due is left alone, and nothing is collected twice.

Give members time to pay by card

How long members get to settle by card before Direct Debit takes the money is the Card-payment delay, and it lives on the Direct Debit screen rather than here — it means nothing to a syndicate that doesn’t collect by Direct Debit.

The delay is counted in working days from the day a charge became due, and the collection request goes to the payment provider that morning. The minimum is one working day and the default is three, so for a bill issued on a Friday the collection is submitted the following Wednesday morning; the money leaves each member’s account a few working days after that, on a day the payment provider sets, not Syndik8. See collect by Direct Debit.

The delay is friendlier to members and cuts down on surprise bank draws and bounced Direct Debits; the only cost is that the treasurer waits a little longer for the funds.

Bill automatically each month

Rather than remembering to make balances due by hand, turn on Bill automatically each month under Automatic monthly billing on the Billing screen, then pick the day of the month, and Syndik8 bills everyone for you from 9am on that day, in your syndicate’s timezone. A day beyond a shorter month’s length bills on that month’s last day (so “31” behaves as end-of-month). Switching it back off returns the syndicate to billing by hand.

• If the day you pick has already passed this month, automatic billing starts next month — enabling a schedule never triggers an immediate bill run. Want to bill sooner? Use Make balances due.
• A day or two before the run, if any bookings are still unfinalised, you get a heads-up so you can resolve them in time.
• At the run, everyone who is ready is billed. Anything still unfinalised is skipped, rolls forward to the next run, and you’re told how many couldn’t be billed. One stuck booking never holds up the whole syndicate’s billing.
• If a run is ever missed on its day (say, during maintenance), it catches up automatically at the next opportunity rather than skipping the month.

Automatic billing works best with auto-finalise on (so flown bookings turn into charges before the run); if it’s off, the screen nudges you, because unfinalised bookings won’t be billed. The auto-finalise switch is at the top of the same Billing screen — see enable auto-finalisation.

Unfinalised bookings

If the preview warns about unfinalised bookings, the close still goes ahead — it’s a warning, not a blocker. Finalising a booking can need judgement (a shortfall waiver, a custom charge, a tacho-continuity conflict), so the close never does it for you. Finalise those bookings yourself, before or after closing, using finalise a booking or finalise multiple bookings at once.

If it goes wrong

• The section isn’t there. You’re not an admin on this syndicate. Billing due mode and the close action are admin-only.
• The preview says nothing is currently accruing. Every charge is already due (common on an on finalisation syndicate, or if you’ve already closed this period) and nobody is left owing anything. Confirming is disabled in that case — there’s nothing to close. If members still owe money, the preview instead says “No charges will be marked as due” alongside who still owes, and confirming is allowed; it changes nothing on the ledger.
• A member I expected to be collected shows up in the manual list instead. They have no active Direct Debit mandate, or they are no longer an active member: someone who has left still holding a live mandate is never debited, so they are counted as someone to chase. Prompt them to set one up — see collect by Direct Debit — and they’ll be swept into Direct Debit collection from their next due balance onward.

See also

• Direct Debit: what a Direct Debit is and how mandates, advance notices, and the guarantee work.
• Collect by Direct Debit: the card-payment delay a close feeds into, and the one-off “Collect now” override.
• Payment account and Billing: where the billing due mode and close action live.
• Issue a cash call: the independent “pay by date” charge that a billing-period close never touches.
• Finalise a booking: manual finalisation for a single unfinalised booking.
• Finalise multiple bookings at once: clear the unfinalised-bookings warning in bulk before closing.