Your Billing Cycle in Automatic Mode
A "billing cycle" — how often each invoice period repeats (the invoice interval) and which day it starts on (the anchor day) — only exists for calendar based billing once a contract is on automatic collection. In manual
This Only Applies to Automatic Collection
For manual calendar billing, there is no billing cycle to configure. Each time you generate invoices, you choose the date range yourself on the spot — a week, a month, a term, whatever suits that round. There's no interval, no anchor day, and nothing recurring: manual generation simply bills whatever's scheduled in the range you pick, and you can pick a different range next time.
The invoice interval and anchor day described on this page are settings on the billing contract that only take effect once that contract's collection mode is switched to Automatic — they define the recurring schedule the platform follows so it knows what period to generate next, without you choosing a range yourself. See Manual vs Automatic Invoice Collection for how the two modes differ more generally.
What Is a Billing Cycle?
A billing cycle defines the recurring pattern an automatic contract follows for generating invoices. Together, the invoice interval and anchor day define the exact date range each automatically generated invoice will cover.
For example, if you set a monthly interval with an anchor day of the 1st, the platform will generate a draft invoice at the start of each month covering all lessons in that month. If you set the anchor day to the 15th, each billing period runs from the 15th to the 14th of the following month.
Invoice Interval
The invoice interval is how many months each billing period covers. Common values are:
- 1 month — bill monthly (most common for ongoing weekly lessons).
- 2 months — bill every two months.
- 3 months — bill quarterly (common for studios that bill per school term).
The interval you set determines how many lessons are counted per invoice. A longer interval means more lessons and a higher invoice amount per billing cycle.
Anchor Day
The anchor day is the day of the month that your billing cycle is anchored to. It determines when each billing period starts and when draft invoices are created.
For example:
- Anchor day = 1 → each billing period starts on the 1st of the month.
- Anchor day = 15 → each billing period starts on the 15th of the month.
Billing In Advance vs Billing After the Fact
Because calendar billing counts from the schedule, you can generate invoices at any point relative to the lessons — before or after they happen. In manual mode, the timing is entirely up to you, and there's no cycle involved:
| Approach | How It Works |
|---|---|
| Billing in advance | Generate invoices before lessons have happened, using whatever future date range you choose. Families pay for upcoming lessons based on what is already scheduled. |
| Billing after the fact | Generate invoices at the end of the period, once all lessons have taken place. The schedule reflects the lessons that occurred, so the invoice is accurate. If you removed any lessons from the schedule during the month, the invoice will reflect those changes. |
In automatic mode, generation always happens before the period starts, by however many days your lead-time settings specify — see Automatic Invoicing, Lead Time, and Auto-Send. This means automatic collection is effectively always "billing in advance," even if the invoice content (the lessons counted) is exactly the same as if you'd generated it manually on the day.
A Worked Example
Billing Cycles and Individual Student Contracts
Each automatic student enrolment can have its own billing cycle. This means you can have one student on a monthly cycle starting the 1st, another on a monthly cycle starting the 15th, and a third on a quarterly cycle — all at the same time.
This is useful for pricing flexibility across families, not just different start dates (for that, see the contract's own "Bills starting from" date, which controls when a specific enrolment's billing actually begins). For example, you might offer a discounted lesson rate to families willing to commit to less frequent billing — a 6-monthly cycle at a lower rate per lesson than the standard monthly cycle. You'd set up a separate, discounted lesson type for that rate, assign it to the families who choose it, and put their contract on a 6-month interval. Everyone else stays on whatever cycle suits them, all managed independently per enrolment.
Changing an Automatic Billing Cycle Later
You can change an enrolment's anchor day or invoice interval after invoices already exist. Set Bills starting from to a date after the latest period already covered by an existing calendar invoice. The existing invoices stay as they are, and the new cycle begins from the date you choose.
Octavia stops the change if the new schedule would overlap an existing invoice period and tells you the earliest date you can use. Draft invoices count too; if a draft was generated for a future period that you now want the new cycle to cover, void or otherwise resolve that invoice first. Choosing a later start date is allowed, but it can intentionally leave an unbilled gap between the old and new schedules.
This restriction only applies to calendar billing on Automatic collection. Manual calendar billing continues to use the date range you choose for each run.
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