Invoices, payments and credit notes发票、付款与贷记单

Three documents carry all the money. None of them is ever edited — which is exactly why the books hold up.所有的钱都由这三种单据承载。它们从不被修改——账目站得住脚正是因为这样。

这篇指南的正文目前只有英文版。标题、摘要与导览已翻译；内文仍在翻译中。

Money in Hull is recorded the way an accountant would recognise: as documents that are issued and then never quietly changed. Once you know the three, most billing questions answer themselves.

The invoice — what was charged

An invoice belongs to the parent, not to a child, and it can carry several lines: two siblings and three packages in one cart produce one invoice.

Its lines hold the money — the price, the discount, the tax. This is why the package on a child's profile does not show a price: the price is on the invoice line that bought it.

An invoice's status is worked out, not set. Issued, then part paid, then paid, purely from what has been received against it. Nobody marks an invoice paid by hand.

An invoice can also carry merchandise. A line is either a package or a product — goggles, a uniform, a book — never both, so a cap and a term package go on one invoice, one payment, one receipt.

The name on the document

A payer can have a second name, usually their company, for families claiming fees through a business. When you issue a document you pick between the two — never free text — and the name is frozen onto that document, so reprinting it in two years gives you the same paper.

Set the second name on the parent's profile. It replaces the old workaround of keeping a duplicate account, which split one family's history in two.

The payment — what was received

A payment records money arriving: when, how, how much, and with what evidence.

One payment can settle several invoices, and one invoice can be settled by several payments. That is normal — a family paying half now and half next week is two payments against one invoice, and the invoice moves to paid on the second.

The receipt is anchored to the payment. It proves money changed hands, which is why it can only exist once money has.

The credit note — what was given back

The only way to reduce an invoice. Never an edit, never a deletion.

The common case is a cancelled package: the unused portion is valued and reversed by a credit note, and that value becomes credit the family can spend on their next purchase. The original sale stays on the record, which is the point — you can still see what was sold, and separately see what was given back.

Why nothing is edited

Because a number that can be changed silently cannot be trusted later.

If an invoice could be edited, then "what did this family pay in March?" would have no fixed answer, a receipt already emailed would stop matching the record, and the figures pushed to your accounting system would drift from the ones in Hull. Corrections as new documents keep every version of the truth on the record.

Cancelling a document

A money document is never edited — that is the whole point of it. But one can be cancelled, and both an invoice and a credit note now carry when it was cancelled and why, which is the first thing anyone asks months later.

A cancelled document drops out of everything that counts money: the totals, the tax line, what a family owes, the credit available at checkout, the sales report and the file your accountant receives. It stays visible as a record of what happened rather than disappearing.

Your accountant's own numbering

If your accountant has numbered documents their own way for years — *A2607/001* for one branch, *P2607/202* for another — Hull can issue that number rather than forcing everyone onto its own.

Your academy writes the shape once and sees a live preview of the result: a branch letter, the year and month, and a counter that restarts each month. Blank means Hull's own numbering, which is the default and needs no setup at all.

• The number is given when the document is issued and never changes.
• It appears under Hull's own number on the invoice and payment lists, so a document can be found in either system.
• When it syncs, that number goes across as the document number and Hull's own travels with it as the reference — so one document reads the same in both places.

Tax

SST is charged on what remains after discounts, at the rate your academy is set up with. Revenue reporting uses the figure before tax, so the numbers you manage the business on are not inflated by tax you are only collecting.

When a parent asks for their own e-invoice

Every sale is already reported to the tax authority, but inside the month's consolidated e-invoice — one document covering the whole month and naming nobody. So there has never been a document to hand a parent who asks for "my e-invoice".

Where your academy has this switched on, the desk can now request one. Enter the parent's tax number on the invoice, press Request, and once it is validated a link to the stamped document appears to copy to the parent. That link *is* the e-invoice — the tax authority publishes it, and it is the same address a receipt QR code already points at. That sale then leaves the month's consolidated batch, so it is never reported twice.

Related: Check what a family owes · Class credits and account credit · How revenue is counted.