Adding, creating, sharing, and sending a customer shipment invoice

Creating documents for your customers can be time consuming, delaying the time to pay. Luckily, Turvo has a built in feature that allows you to quickly and easily create many different kinds of documents. The following article will walk you through the customer invoice process, and at the end you'll be ready to create your own in Turvo! This tool builds each document using information that's already been entered into the specific shipment you're viewing. As long as the shipment details are complete and accurate, Turvo handles the rest.

Note: This article is specific to manually adding or creating customer invoices for shipments.

• To learn more about automating the customer invoice creation process, see our article on How to use Auto-invoicing for customer invoices.
• To learn more about carrier invoices for shipments, see our article on How to add and share a carrier invoice.

Required supporting documentation for customer invoicing

Some customers may require supporting documentation, such as a Proof of delivery (POD), Bill of Lading (BOL), or other documents along with your customer invoice. Turvo provides automation tools so that all required supporting documents will be appended to the PDF file that is generated when creating a new invoice document. Before submitting an invoice to your customer, be sure that all documents required for customer invoicing are added to the shipment. See our Configuring required document rules for customer invoicing article to learn more about configuring required document rules for all customers on your tenant and for specific customers.

Access the shipment

To create or add the shipment’s customer invoice:

1. Navigate to a shipment, either by hovering over the left navigation and clicking Shipments to see all of the shipments shared with you, or by searching for the shipment in the global search bar.

2. Prior to creating or adding an invoice, it's important to make sure the shipment has a customer, as well as the relevant costs added to that customer. To view and/or add a customer cost, navigate to the shipment’s Details tab > Customers block > Costs segment in your shipment.

Protip: While you can create a customer invoice during any stage of a shipment's journey, Turvo recommends creating customer invoices during the Route complete phase. Accessorial charges may accrue up until the shipment route is complete, so it's best to wait until all appropriate costs are accounted for. 

3. Once all appropriate customer costs are added, navigate to the Documents tab and select + Add document to launch the modal.

Add or create the customer invoice

The Add document modal is used throughout Turvo to add or create documents that are attached to shipments, orders, accounts, locations, and other entities within Turvo. The “document” created is actually a data object that can contain one or more document files.

For customer invoices, you can either add an invoice by uploading an external invoice document file or create an invoice document within Turvo using a customer invoice template created in the Admin console > Document templates page.

Protip: The Document templates page provides a Turvo-created customer invoice template and the ability to customize your own customer invoice templates and assign them to specific customer accounts.

See our article on Configuring Document templates in Admin console to learn more about configuring the customer invoice template. 

To add or create a customer invoice:

1. Select Customer invoice under the Document type drop-down:

2. Enter the relevant details in the Add document modal that appears. This modal changes based on the type of document being created. Descriptions for each field that appears when creating a customer invoice are listed below.

• Document type: This will auto-populate with the document type. However, if you selected the wrong type of document, you can select the correct type from the drop-down menu.
• Name/Description: Enter the name and description of the invoice here; both fields are optional. Unless pre-determined guidelines have been set by your employer, we suggest formatting it as the following: [CustomerName], [ShipmentID], [Date].
• Customer: The customer of this shipment populates in this field automatically based on shipment details.
• Invoice date: The date the invoice is being created appears here.
• Invoice amount: This amount reflects the customer costs in the Customer segment of the shipment.
• Adjust costs: Click the Adjust costs link to go back to the shipment and change costs if the costs do not look correct. Costs should have already been adjusted at this point, but can always be changed at any time.
• Due date: This date reflects the Payment terms set up in the Admin console > Payments section of the company profile. To adjust terms, see our How to adjust payment terms, methods, and advances in Admin Console article.
• Invoice #: This is automatically created, but can be manually edited. 
  • Note: If the customer account has a customer invoice ID number sequence assigned for individual invoices, invoices will be created with invoice ID numbers that follow the sequence’s rules. If an invoice ID number is generated using an assigned sequence, this field will be read-only. See our Configuring and assigning customer invoice ID number sequence rules article to learn more about customer invoice ID sequences.
• When you select Customer invoice in the Add document modal’s Document type field, a Status field is included in the modal. Use the drop-down to select one of the following statuses:
  • Draft: The invoice has not been finalized and not ready to be shared.
  • Received: The invoice has been received by the partner tenant it was shared with.
  • Approved: The invoice is finalized and no more changes are needed.
    • Note: Your organization’s tenant may be configured so that the status must be set to Approved for the invoice to be sent to your financial management system. If unsure, check with your organization.
  • Rejected: The invoice was created but rejected. This may be used when sharing a document with another organization’s tenant, indicating that the recipient has rejected the document and it needs to be updated.
  • Void: The invoice has been voided. A copy is kept for auditing purposes, but the invoice is no longer valid for the shipment.
• Show equipment used: If checked, the invoice includes information on equipment used for the shipment.
• Append POD: If checked, the Proof of delivery (POD) is added to the customer invoice PDF that is generated by using the steps listed in this article.
  • Note: If the Automatically append required documents to Customer Invoice setting is toggled on in your tenant’s billing document rules or in the customer’s profile, and either the POD or the POD or BOL options are selected in the Required documents setting in your tenant’s billing document rules, then this is checked automatically. If unchecked, the POD is attached to the customer invoice delivery email as a separate file. This checkbox only affects whether the Proof of delivery is appended to the customer invoice. See our Configuring required document rules for customer invoicing article to learn more about configuring billing document rules.
• Notes: Anything added to this field will appear on the finished document. These are very specific to your business and its processes, but know the customer will be able to view these as well.
• Document: You can choose to upload a file instead of using a system generated invoice if you prefer. If you choose to upload a file of your own, Turvo will use that in place of a system generated one. Once a document has been uploaded, the CREATE button will change to the UPLOAD button and Turvo will use that in place of a system generated one.

Note: Up to 100 megabytes (MB) of files can be attached to a document.

3. Once you have updated any fields or settings on the modal check the sharing drop-down in the bottom left of the modal to ensure all parties that you want the document to share to are selected. See the Sharing the invoice section below to learn more.
4. Once you are satisfied with the information entered in the Add documents modal: 
   1. Select CREATE to generate the customer invoice using the document template and attach it to the shipment.
      1. Protip: If the Automatically append required documents to Customer Invoice toggle in Admin console > Payments > Billing document rules is on, then all of the required documentation that is uploaded to the shipment will be included as pages within the invoice PDF file that is created. 
   2. If you uploaded an external document file, click the UPLOAD button to add the invoice to the shipment.
5. The document preview window will appear. From here, you can edit the pages included in the document, update the document’s information, download the file to your device, or email the document to your customer. Click the X in the top right to close the preview window.

Protip: See the following articles to learn more about the document preview window’s features:

• Add, create, share, or send a document in a shipment
• How to edit the pages in a document

Any created or uploaded documents associated with any shipment can always be found by navigating to the Documents tab within the shipment, where they can be archived or updated. See our article on How to archive and update documents to learn more.

Sharing the invoice

If you are working with a Turvo-connected customer, you have the option to share the invoice with them as a part of the shipment record. Once shared, the customer can access the invoice document in the shipment or order’s Documents tab. 

To enable sharing of the invoice manually use the sharing drop-down menu at the bottom of the Add document modal. A padlock symbol and My company means the invoice will only be shared with your organization. If your customer doesn't appear as a sharing option in the drop-down menu, they don't have their own Turvo tenant and invoices can't be shared. 

If your organization and the customer are listed, the document will be shared with the customer.  

To remove a customer from document sharing, click the customer name. If a customer has been successfully removed, the checkmark to the left of their name will disappear. Then click APPLY.

After creating or adding the invoice, with the CREATE or UPLOAD buttons, the invoice will be shared to all tenants checked in the sharing drop-down menu. 

Sending the invoice

If your customer is not Turvo-connected, you can send the invoice to a contact email address.

The email subject and body text are editable to say whatever you'd like. The Reply to email address is configured with your account, and you will need to reach out to Turvo support if it needs to be changed.

Your settings in the Email section of Admin Console > Rules determine whether the files for the selected documents will be sent to your shipping partner as attachments on the email or as downloadable links. See our article, Configuring business rules for emails, to learn more about setting file size limits for your tenant.

Generating, sending, and sharing the customer invoice automatically

Using the auto-invoicing feature on your tenant, and the customer’s account is configured for auto-invoicing, Turvo can generate the customer’s shipment invoice from a template and email it to the customer automatically once the shipment reaches the Ready for Billing status. 

If the auto-invoice feature is enabled for your tenant, by default you have access to the invoice auto-share feature, which will automatically share the invoice to the customer’s tenant.

See our How to use Auto-invoicing for customer invoices article to learn more about auto-invoicing and invoice auto-sharing.