Billing Automation

The Automation tab on your billing dashboard is where you turn on hands-off billing: automatic monthly invoices, autopay, payment reminders, late fees, and grace periods. The tab has two sections - Settings and Recent Activity.

Settings

The Settings form holds your studio-wide automation settings. Each section turns on with a switch, reveals its own options, and has its own Run ... Now button so you can run that job on demand instead of waiting for the schedule:

Autopay - automatically charge invoices on their due date, or earlier: Days Before Due sets how many days ahead of the due date the charge runs (0 means on the due date). Bank debits always start early enough to clear by the due date, even when this is set low. Families see the scheduled charge date on their invoice. Run Autopay Now charges all eligible unpaid invoices; it is safe to run more than once, since invoices already charged today are skipped.
Payment Retries - retry failed charges on a schedule you set, entered as comma-separated days after the failure.
Monthly Invoices - turn on Create and send monthly invoices on the 1st and Trio runs a monthly billing run for you each month (see Monthly Billing Runs below). Invoices are due this many days after they are created sets the due date for every monthly billing run, automatic or manual (0 to 30 days; 14 by default). When a family's invoice needs review decides what an automatic run does with an invoice that has a warning: Send the clean ones, hold the rest sends every invoice with no warnings and holds the flagged families as drafts, while Hold all for my review holds every invoice as a draft until you send it.
Pay to Book - Hours to pay before a booking is released is how long a lesson on a pay-to-book plan stays held while the family pays (1 to 168 hours; 48 by default). An unpaid hold releases the time.
Packages - Warn when a package has this many lessons left sets the low-balance notice (1 to 5 lessons), and Let families buy a new package themselves lets a family with a low or empty package buy the next one from their portal.
Reminders - send payment reminders on Reminder Offsets relative to the due date. Negative numbers are days before due, positive numbers are days after. Run Reminders Now sends reminders to families with unpaid invoices.
Overdue Invoices - set a Grace Period of days after the due date before an invoice is marked overdue.
Late Fees - turn on automatic late fees with Automatically Assess Late Fees. The fee amount and grace period are set once on the Rates and Fees tab, so they stay consistent everywhere they apply. Run Late Fees Now applies late fees to overdue invoices that qualify, skipping any already charged today.
Notification Channels - send billing notices by email only, or follow each family's own channel preference.
Notification Copies - receive a copy of every automated billing email at a BCC Email Address.

Each Run ... Now button is disabled until its matching setting is enabled. Only owners and admins can edit these settings.

Autopay Requirements

Autopay charges an invoice only when autopay is enabled, the invoice is sent, overdue, or partially paid, the family has a default payment method on file, and a balance remains. Invoices that miss any of these are skipped, so families without a saved card are never charged.

Reminder Cadence

Reminders go out on each offset you configure. A reminder at -7, for example, sends a week before the due date; an offset of 1 sends the day after. Delivery follows your Notification Channels setting and each family's contact preferences.

Late Fees

Once an invoice passes the configured number of days after its due date, Trio adds the late fee to it as a new line item, and the invoice total updates. You can remove a late fee from the invoice's detail drawer if you decide to waive it. The fee amount and grace period live on the Rates and Fees tab; the Automation tab only turns automatic assessment on or off.

Monthly Billing Runs

A monthly billing run creates the month's invoices, one per family: the month's subscription tuition billed in advance, plus the previous month's per-lesson charges, fees, and forfeits in arrears. Each invoice is due the number of days after the run that you set in Monthly Invoices.

Runs happen two ways:

Automatic - with Create and send monthly invoices on the 1st turned on, Trio runs on the 1st of each month in your studio's timezone (turn it on mid-month and the first run happens the next morning). Clean invoices are sent to families; invoices that need review are held as drafts according to your review setting. Owners and admins get a notice with the sent and held counts.
Manual - Generate Invoices on the Invoices tab, next to New Invoice, runs the same monthly billing run on demand and leaves every invoice as a draft for you to send. Pick the Billing Month; the dialog shows the due date the run will use. An advanced option still lets you bill a custom date range instead. Use Preview to see exactly what would be generated before pressing Generate. The Family selector scopes the run to a single family or all families, and each family's detail page has a Generate invoice shortcut that opens the dialog already scoped to that family. The Invoices list refreshes as soon as a run commits, so new drafts appear without reloading the page.

Trio never bills the same month twice: an automatic run skips a month that already has one, and lessons already on a live invoice are not billed again.

Recent Activity

The Recent Activity panel has two lists.

Billing runs shows each monthly billing run, newest first, with whether it was Automatic or Manual, the billing month, when it started, and how many invoices were created, sent, and held. A run still in progress says so. Expand a run with held families to see each family and the warning that held it, so you can fix the underlying plan or lesson and send the draft. A failed run shows the error.

Below it, Autopay, late fees, and reminders lists the latest job runs with the trigger source, timestamp, and a count of how many items succeeded, failed, or were skipped. Check both lists after enabling automation to confirm the scheduled jobs are running as expected.