Bill-in-Arrears Accounts Billing

AST's CaptionSync is an automated system and as such all the billing is completed in an automated fashion to help keep our costs to you to an absolute minimum. In this article we answer some of the most common questions about billing for bill-in-arrears accounts.

TABLE OF CONTENTS:
How often should I expect an invoice?
What are your terms?
How do I get a copy of the invoice?
How can I pay an invoice with a credit card?
Can I pay with college, university, or government purchase card or P-card?
How can I set it up so our accounting person gets and pays these invoices?
Why am I receiving an invoice one month for Result Review and the next month for the captioning?
Can I pay via ACH or check (cheque)?
How do I change our account to Prepay?
How do I get more detail like the AST ID or user who submitted?
After paying an Invoice, how do I get a copy marked Paid or a receipt?
Can you reference purchase orders?
Can we set amounts and/or expiration dates for our purchase orders?
Can I extend the purchase order expiration date or increase the total amounts?
Why am I getting multiple invoices each with different purchase orders on them?
Can I alter a purchase order, change billing contact, split an invoice, or otherwise change an invoice after it has been generated?
How can I get separate Invoices for different Submissions?
Can I get a breakdown of the costs on my invoice?
Why don't the detail line items add up to the total?

Bill-in-Arrears Accounts Questions:

How often should I expect an invoice?

AST’s automated billing system runs at the beginning of each month to invoice for use in the previous month. There may be a delay if the system needs to wait for transcription submissions in progress to complete before invoicing.

You will only receive an invoice if you have billable items in the previous month.

What are your terms?

Net 30 on approved credit.

How do I get a copy of the invoice?

Our invoices are issued in PDF format and sent via email. You can configure the address to which invoices are sent on your CaptionSync account. Only users with Manage Organization privileges can configure who receives an email copy of the invoice; it can be done via Settings -> Organization Settings. Recipients can include the email address(es) associated with the primary user, the Purchasing contact, both, or neither. If you want to have multiple addresses for the Purchasing contact, just provide the emails as a comma-separated list of addresses.

In addition, the primary user and any user with See/Pay Invoices privileges can access the invoice history by going to Billing -> Invoices. 

Note: Manual entry of invoices into non-AST systems will be accommodated, when feasible, but additional fees will apply.

How can I pay an invoice with a credit card?

Any user with See/Pay Invoices privileges can simply click the Pay Now link beside the invoice you are looking to pay. Invoices are listed on the Invoicing Summary page via Billing -> Invoices.

Please note that there is an upper limit to the size of invoice you can pay by credit card, and if the invoice exceeds that limit, then no Pay Now link will appear beside the invoice. You can see what the limit is on any Invoice page.

Can I pay with college, university, or government purchase card or P-card?

Yes, we accept Visa, MasterCard, Discover, and American Express cards.
Please note that there is an upper limit to the size of invoice you can pay by credit card, and if the invoice exceeds that limit, then no Pay Now link will appear beside the invoice. You can see what the limit is on any Invoice page.

How can I set it up so our accounting person gets and pays these invoices?

Any user with Manage Organization privileges can configure who receives an email copy of the invoice via Settings -> Organization Settings. Recipients can include the email address(es) associated with the primary user, the accounting email address(es), both, or neither.

Any user with Manage Users privileges can control which users can view/pay invoices via Settings -> Manage Users.

To create a new login with See/Pay Invoices privileges, have any user with Manage Users privileges (such as the primary user) create one via Settings -> Manage Users. By default, a user with just See/Pay Invoices privileges is restricted to have no ability to submit material for captioning or transcription – only to view and/or pay invoices.

Why am I receiving an invoice one month for Result Review and the next month for the captioning?

Result Review is invoiced in the month that the submission was created whereas captioning (and transcription) are invoiced in the month they are both first billable, which could be the following month if the original submission failed.

Also, if the Result Review was added after the original submission was already invoiced, it will be invoiced separately in a later invoice.

Can I pay via ACH or check (cheque)?

Yes.

How do I change our account to Prepay?

You may pre-purchase CaptionSync time in order to take advantage of volume discounts. Pre-purchased CaptionSync time is non-refundable.

How do I get more detail like the AST ID or user who submitted?

Under Billing -> Invoices-> Invoice Details, you can download a tab-delimited text file, which contains all of the data in the .txt format, and more details than the original invoice. If you open the file with Excel (on Windows, right-click on the file and use Open with), then you can fairly easily use the invoice data in a spreadsheet:

After paying an Invoice, how do I get a copy marked Paid or a receipt?

After you have paid an invoice, you will see a link called Show invoice marked paid, on the Status line. If you click on this, you will get a PDF with Paid stamped on it. If there were any extra charges on your invoice, such as late fees, they will also be noted on this Paid copy. You can also just print the Invoice Details page as a receipt for your payment, as it shows the invoice status as Paid, along with the payment date.

Can you reference purchase orders?

For Education and Government approved accounts, we can set up your account to accept a purchase order with each submission. If you requested a Purchase Order account when you signed up, your account will be set up so that it requires a purchase order for each submission you make. Detailed information is provided in our Managing and Adding Purchase Orders article.

Note that the purchase order you enter will appear exactly as you entered it on your invoice. Please ensure you enter a valid purchase order in this field, otherwise, your accounting department will reject the invoice. The downside of this option is that if you are in a hurry and your purchasing department has not yet issued a purchase order, you cannot start submitting – “TBD” or “Will call in” is not an acceptable purchase order.

Alternatively, if you did not request to use purchase orders when you applied for your account, CaptionSync will not prompt you for a purchase order and no purchase order will appear on your invoices. However, you can simply write your purchase order on the PDF invoice you receive from AST before you submit it to accounting. This is the path for cases where you need to use CaptionSync, but do not yet have a purchase order.

You can change whether your account requires a purchase order at any time

Can we set amounts and/or expiration dates for our purchase order?

Yes. You can set an expiration date for a purchase order or an expiration date and maximum dollar amount. To do so, use the Add Purchase Order or Modify Purchase Order pages under the Billing tab and enter in an expiration date or expiration date and total amount – these are optional. Detailed information is provided in our Managing and Adding Purchase Orders article.

When the expiration date or total amount is hit, submissions referencing that purchase order will no longer be accepted and it will be unset as default purchase order (if it was), so be mindful of how this may impact any of your automated system sending material to CaptionSync. To avoid this situation, we will email the same people who receive invoices when the expiration date or total amount is close.

While we do our best to monitor the dollar amount, some items may be in process, resulting in overages.

Can I extend the purchase order expiration date or increase the total amounts?

Yes. For up to 3 weeks after the purchase order has expired, the expiration date may be extended and/or the total amount increased. Also, the expiration date and total amount may be removed.

Keep in mind that once the purchase order has expired or gone over the limit, it is no longer the default. Therefore, after you have made changes to make an expired or over limit purchase order valid again, you will need to make it default via Billing -> Set Default Purchase Order.

Why am I getting multiple invoices each with different purchase order on them?

Our automated system will send out separate invoices for each unique purchase order entered by the users. Our system remembers your purchase orders, so it’s easy to always use the same one for the whole month (or keep using an open purchase order) if you want. Otherwise, if you keep using more than one purchase order per month you will keep getting more than one invoice. Alternatively, you can choose to have our system not require a purchase order and you will receive only one invoice per month…

Can I alter a purchase order, change billing contact, split an invoice, or otherwise change an invoice after it has been generated?

Automation is what allows us to deliver our cost-effective pricing. Our automated system creates invoices based on the specific information entered by your users. Once they’re created, they cannot be altered without manual labor. As such, any changes to automatically created invoices will incur a change fee. But there are a few things you can change yourself:

• Before an invoice is generated, the purchase order referenced on submissions can be changed via Caption/Transcribe -> Status of Submissions, and the billing contact can be changed via Settings -> Manage Organization.

• You can use the Customer Added feature to include text in your invoice, such as invoicing codes, department name, processing instructions, etc. More information is available in our CaptionSync Invoices: Description and Features article.

How can I get separate Invoices for different Submissions?

If you have a postpaid account, and want to have separate invoicing for different submissions, you can use purchase numbers to achieve that. Learn how in our How to get separate Invoices for different Submissions article.

Can I get a breakdown of the costs on my invoice?

Yes, check out our article where we describe in detail the structure and features of our invoices. Basically, there are two sections on the invoice:

• The Summary section displays the total hours for each service delivered under Qty and associated hourly cost under Unit Cost. The Code and Description columns effectively work as as a legend. Note that the Summary is presented in hours and the Detail is in minutes.

• The Detail section displays each submission to our system on a line-by-line basis, with per minute resolution. The Code column here indicates which services were delivered for each line item. The Unit Cost column reflects the sum of the costs for all services on that line item per minute, and the Extended column is the Unit cost times the duration shown in the Qty column for that line item.

Why don't the detail line items add up to the total?

In the Detail section, each submission to our system is listed on a line-by-line basis. These line items are presented only to the cent level of precision, but we retain the true value for aggregation and only do any rounding off at the very end (the total). For example, we display $30.83 for a 10-minute submission (based on $185/media hour) but keep in mind that the true value is $30.833333333333333. So six 10 minute submissions will obviously total $185.00 although if you add up displayed $30.83 six times you will only get $184.98. The correct value of $185.00 can be cross-checked by adding up the true value of $30.833333333333333 six times…