Knowledge Base

This article applies to calendar-based, monthly (flat subscription), and term billing — any billing type that supports automatic collection. Lesson packs don't use this timeline, since they aren't generated on a schedule.

Two Ways to Use Automatic Collection

Turning on automatic collection for an enrolment doesn't automatically mean invoices go out to families without you seeing them. There are two distinct levels, controlled by two independent settings:

1. Auto-generate, manual review (the default) — the platform creates the draft invoice for you on schedule, but it stops there. You still review it and click Send yourself, exactly as you would for a manually generated invoice. Nothing reaches a family without you looking at it first.
2. Auto-generate and auto-send (fully automatic) — you additionally turn on the "Automatically send once generated" option on the contract. Once that's on, the invoice is emailed to the family the moment its send date arrives, with no review step from you at all.

Every automatic contract is on level 1 by default. Moving to level 2 is a separate, deliberate choice per enrolment — see Automatic Sending below.

The Three Lead-Time Settings

Every enrolment on automatic collection has three settings that control when things happen, separate from the billing period itself:

These stack together, counting backwards from the billing period's own start date. With the defaults above, for a period starting on the 1st of the month:

• 24 days before (14 + 3 + 7) — you get a heads-up reminder email.
• 17 days before (14 + 3) — the invoice is generated as a draft.
• 14 days before — the invoice is sent to the family (if auto-send is on).

You can change any of these three numbers for an individual enrolment, or set your own school-wide defaults that new enrolments start from — see Configuring Your Billing Settings.

The Heads-Up Reminder Email

Before anything is generated, you'll receive an email listing every contract that's about to be auto-generated — grouped by billing type, with the student or group name for each. This is a snapshot: if you add, remove, or edit a student's details after the email arrives but before generation actually happens, the real invoice will reflect the up-to-date information, not what the email described.

Use this window to double-check your student list, lesson schedule, or contract settings are correct before the system generates off them.

You'll only get one heads-up email per day, even if several contracts are due at once — it's a single batched summary, not one email per student.

The Review-Ready Email

Once invoices have actually been generated automatically, you'll get a second email letting you know drafts are ready to review — with a count of how many were created, broken down by billing type. This links straight to your Invoices page so you can check the drafts before they go out.

If nothing was generated that day, you won't receive this email — it only fires when there's actually something new to review.

Automatic Sending

By default, an automatically generated invoice still sits as a draft — exactly like a manually generated one — waiting for you to review and send it yourself. If you'd rather not do that step manually, each enrolment has an "Automatically send once generated" option. When this is on, the invoice is emailed to the family automatically once its send date arrives — the same email, payment link, and recipient logic as if you'd clicked Send yourself, just without you having to do it.

Turning automatic sending off doesn't stop invoices from being generated automatically — it only means you'll need to send them yourself once they're ready. The two settings (auto-generate and auto-send) are independent.

In School Billing Settings, you can choose to CC the school's billing administrator on automatically sent invoice emails. This is a school-wide preference: when enabled, the administrator receives a copy of every family-facing invoice email sent automatically. It does not add a CC to invoices you send manually; use the one-off CC me option in the send confirmation window for those.

How Automatic Generation Works, Mode by Mode

Automatic collection follows the same lead-time timeline for every billing model, but the way it decides what to generate — and what happens if it falls behind — differs enough between models that it's worth understanding for the one you use.

Monthly (Flat Subscription) Billing

Automatic monthly billing works through periods in strict order. Each contract tracks where it's up to — the end of the last period it billed, or its "Bills starting from" date if it hasn't billed anything yet — and each day, the system checks whether the next period in sequence is due (within lead time). It can't skip ahead to the current month without accounting for every month before it.

There is one no-charge case: if "Bills starting from" leaves only a very short opening slice before the next anchor date, monthly proration can round that slice to zero. Octavia records those dates as accounted for without creating or sending a $0 invoice, then continues with the next chargeable period. The contract review warns you before saving and shows which period will become the first real invoice.

If there's more than one unbilled period sitting in the backlog, they don't arrive as separate invoices. They merge as extra line items onto the same draft invoice, one additional period appearing per day, until the system catches up to the present.

What this means in practice: if a monthly contract's "Bills starting from" date is set several months in the past, the family won't get one clean invoice for the current month. Instead, over the following days, they'll see a single invoice slowly grow to include every month back to that start date — and it won't reach the current month until it has worked through everything earlier. See Why "Bills Starting From" Matters below.

Calendar-Based Billing

Calendar billing also works through periods in order, at the same one-period-per-day pace, using the same "where did it last leave off" tracking. The difference is what happens to the backlog: instead of merging onto one invoice, each period becomes its own separate invoice. A calendar contract with a backlog will produce a series of invoices appearing over several days as the system catches up, rather than one invoice that keeps growing.

Because calendar billing charges for the actual lessons scheduled within each period — and a lesson is never billed twice no matter how the periods land — working through a backlog this way is always safe. It just means more invoices than you might expect if a start date was set incorrectly.

Term Billing

Term billing doesn't use the same period-by-period, one-per-day pace. Instead, each time automatic generation runs, it looks at every term definition whose start date falls on or after the contract's "Bills starting from" date and generates an invoice for each one whose lead time has already been reached — all in the same run, not spread out gradually.

Switching an existing term contract from manual to automatic collection resets "Bills starting from" to today, so by default it will only ever pick up the next upcoming term — it won't reach back and bill a term that's already underway or finished. If you deliberately set an earlier "Bills starting from" date afterwards, be aware that automatic generation has no separate check for whether a term has already ended — so an earlier date that spans several already-finished terms will generate (and, if auto-send is on, immediately send) invoices for all of them at once the next time it runs.

Why "Bills Starting From" Matters

Every billing contract has a "Bills starting from" date (effective_from) — the earliest date that enrolment can ever be invoiced, under either manual or automatic collection. For a brand-new contract it defaults to today, but it can be changed, and doing so has real consequences once a contract is on automatic collection:

The same sequencing applies to calendar-based billing, though the effect is a run of separate invoices rather than one growing invoice. Term billing doesn't have a period-by-period backlog in the same sense, but an old "Bills starting from" date can still cause several already-finished terms to be invoiced (and possibly sent) at once.

The fix is simple: when you set a contract to automatic collection, set "Bills starting from" to the date you actually want billing to begin — normally today, or the date the enrolment actually starts — rather than leaving it at an old date, unless you genuinely intend to bill retroactively for that whole historical period. If you do need to backdate it for a real reason, expect the backlog behavior described above and plan for it.

You Can Always Generate Manually — Even on Auto

Sometimes you'll want to create an invoice yourself for a student who's normally on automatic collection — to fix something, catch up a backlog immediately instead of waiting for it to trickle in, add a lesson that came up after the invoice already went out, or handle a one-off situation. The manual invoice generator has an "Include students on auto mode" option for this: turning it on reveals your auto-collection students and groups in a separate section, unselected by default, so you can pick exactly who you want to invoice manually without affecting anyone else's automatic schedule.

This is always safe to do, and won't cause double-billing when the automatic run happens later:

• Monthly billing checks where each contract is actually up to before generating the next period, so a manual generation just becomes the next step in the same sequence — the next automatic run picks up from wherever you left it. Manually generating also catches up an entire backlog in one go, rather than waiting for it to trickle in one period per day.
• Calendar billing never bills the same lesson twice, regardless of whether the invoice covering it was created manually or automatically, or whether the date range you chose lines up exactly with the platform's usual periods.
• Term billing won't create a second invoice for a term that's already been invoiced, manually or automatically, for the same student.

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Related articles:

• Configuring Your Billing Settings
• Understanding Billing Contracts
• Generating Invoices: The Review-and-Send Flow
• Sending Invoices and Receipts