Discounts

Discounts can be applied to items billed or to whole invoices. Read on to learn more about how discounts work and best practices for using them.

For more information about monthly billing practices, read this article: Monthly Billing with ALIS

Applying Discounts

Discounts automatically apply to the relevant invoices when you create them. If you edit an existing discount, this will immediately impact the invoices.

Click the +Add Discount button in the Discounts section of a resident profile to get started.

Dates

When you add a discount, the first fields to fill in are Start Date and End Date. These dates determine which invoices will include the discount. If you add a discount with no end date, it will impact all future invoices with this billing item.

Creating discounts with discreet start and end dates are useful for promotions on future months.

For example, you can add two promotional discounts for a resident's third and fifth months of stay. As long as they are dated properly, they will apply automatically when future invoices are run.

• For charges that are prorated within a particular month, applicable discounts will prorate the same way.
• In a less common scenario, you can click the checkbox Excluded from Proration if you want to discount your specific dollar amount even if the applicable charge is prorated.

Subsidies

Subsidies allow us to customize which GL account the discount will go to. When this feature is enabled, your team will find the option to select the appropriate GL account upon creating or editing the discount. 

The discount will display on invoices as a Subsidy.

Discounts Settings

Billing Item and GL Setup

• Any Billing Item can be excluded from Discounts in the settings for individual Billing Items.
• Your Billing Item settings allow you to allocate the charges to a specific GL Account #, and to allocate discounts applied to the item to a separate Discount GL Account #.
  • Set this up when you create or edit your billing items.

For more information about Billing Item settings, read this article: How to add Billing Items in ALIS

Subsidies

To have the option for creating discounts as subsidies, this is a setting that must be turned on at the company level by the ALIS team. Please contact your onboarding manager or the support team to turn on this feature.

Invoice Level Discounts

To control whether your team can apply the discounts to entire invoices, we have the setting "Create Invoice Level Discounts".

• Find this in Settings>Billing in the General>Settings tab in ALIS.
• Turn this to No if this practice is not appropriate for your resident billing.
• This is a community-level setting.

Read this article for more information about Billing Settings: Billing Settings

Rent Concessions

For all rent concessions, select the specific Rent charge as the Billing Item when you are creating the discount in ALIS. Some rent concessions require you to select a specific Subsidy GL Account #.

• Short-term rent concessions should be added with no subsidy account selected. 
• For long-term rent concessions, you must select 410300 in the Subsidy GL Account # field. 
  • You can start typing the number to quickly find it in the menu.

Related articles:

Monthly Billing with ALIS

How to Set Opening Balances

How to verify all resident payers are setup correctly