What is the billing contact?
A billing contact is an Additional Contact on a commercial lease who can be sent tenant statements and invoices.
If you add contacts to a commercial lease, one contact must have a Contact Type that is set up for billing. If there are multiple contacts, only one can be set up for billing.
In the screenshot above, the name of the contact type is "Billing" but what makes it a billing contact type is the setup for the contact type.
Go to Admin > Toolbox > Custom Lists > Contact Types.
For a contact type to be a billing contact type, select the Billing check box.
To avoid confusion, we recommend that you only have one billing contact type, and that you name it "Billing" or "Commercial Billing."
How to Use the Billing Contact
You can use the billing contact for tenant statements or invoices.
Go to Reporting > Correspondence > Tenant. Select the letter type; for example, Tenant Statement.
If you select the Billing contact, you can email each statement to the person who has been given this role.
To remove a billing contact from a lease
To remove a regular contact, you can click the Edit icon and then click the trash can icon at the end of the contact's row. But before you remove the billing contact, you have to change the Contact Type to a non-billing Contact Type, and make another contact the billing contact.
For example, in the lease record shown below, we want to remove the contact named John Doe, who is currently the billing contact.
First, we switch the Contact Type with the second contact.
Then we switch the Primary designation to the second contact.
After saving the changes, we can click the Edit icon and remove John Doe from the lease by clicking the trash can icon at the end of his row.
Trouble-Shooting the Billing Contact
The Billing check box was added with the April, 2020 release. If you set up Contact Types before this release, there are some potential issues when you add contacts to a lease.
For example, you might have a contact type that is named “Billing” but does not have the Billing check box selected. In this case, you would get an error saying that a billing contact is required. As far as you know, you already have one.
Or, you have multiple contact types with the Billing check box selected, but not all of them have "billing" in the name. If you try to add more than one of them to the tenant record, you would get an error saying that you can only have one billing contact. From what you see on screen, only one has “billing” in the name, so this is confusing.
Go to Admin > Toolbox > Custom Lists > Contact Types to determine which contact has the Billing check box selected. Ensure you only have one contact of that type added to the tenant record, and use a different contact type for any other contacts.
There are also potential issues with Correspondence.
Prior to the change, there was no billing checkbox, so you could add a contact type named “billing” and add four contacts of that type to the same tenant record. When generating correspondence, you would pick “billing” in the recipient dropdown and it would generate correspondence for all four of those contacts.
After the change, you can only have one Billing contact per lease record. So now you would need two contact types: one that is actually the billing contact, and one for the other three. And you would have to run Correspondence twice.