Send your first invoice through Aiwyn

Applies to Aiwyn Payments and firms NOT on CCH Axcess.

You create, post and email invoices from your practice management system, and Aiwyn delivers each one to your clients as the Aiwyn invoice email.

On Aiwyn Practice, you send invoices from Aiwyn itself. See How an invoice is issued and delivered.

This tutorial follows a firm that routes invoice emails through a mail rule. If your firm uses CCH Axcess, you send invoice emails directly to your Aiwyn inbound email address instead. See Invoice Email routing options and How CCH Axcess works with Aiwyn Payments.

In this tutorial you will send a test invoice from your practice management system, watch Aiwyn pick it up, and receive the Aiwyn invoice email yourself. Using your own email address lets you follow the process from both the Firm Portal and the client experience.

Once you have done this once, every other article in this category will make sense, because they all describe some part of this path. It takes less than 5 minutes of your time.

Before you begin, create or choose a test client in your practice management system and make yourself the contact who receives invoice emails. Use an email address you can access so you can inspect the client-facing email and open the client portal from its Pay invoice button.

You also need a posted, unpaid test invoice with a small non-zero balance and access to the Aiwyn Firm Portal with the Invoices tab. This tutorial assumes your implementation is complete and your invoice-email routing has already been configured and tested with Aiwyn.

The test scenario

Use your firm's own test data throughout this tutorial:

• Client: a test client created for training or verification
• Invoice recipient: your own email address, saved as the test client's invoice contact
• Invoice: a posted, unpaid test invoice with a small non-zero balance
• Configuration: your firm's mail rule subject line (can only be done AFTER the mail rule has been put in place and tested with Aiwyn Implementation).

Do not use a real client's name, email address or invoice. Do not complete a payment from the client portal unless your firm's test process specifically requires it.

Step 1: Post the invoice

In your practice management system, post your test invoice for your test client. The invoice must be posted and must have an amount due greater than $0. Aiwyn never sends an invoice email for a zero-dollar or fully paid invoice.

You don't have to wait for Aiwyn before you send the email. If the email arrives at Aiwyn before the posted invoice does, Aiwyn holds the email and sends it once the invoice arrives. For this first run, though, wait, so that you can see each stage happen in order.

To see that the invoice has reached Aiwyn, sign in to the Firm Portal and select Invoices. The list opens on the Unpaid tab. Search for your test invoice number. When the invoice is listed, with your test client as the client and the test invoice balance outstanding, Aiwyn has the invoice data. Its invoice number is not yet in teal text, because Aiwyn doesn't have the PDF yet. That comes from the email you send next.

Step 2: Prepare the invoice email

In your practice management system, prepare the invoice email for your test invoice exactly as your firm normally does, and check four things before you send it:

1. The To field contains your own email address as the test client's invoice contact. Aiwyn sends the Aiwyn invoice email to the recipients of your original email for a mail-rule firm.
2. The subject line matches your mail rule: Invoice_Aiwyn.
3. The invoice PDF is attached, one invoice per file.
4. The PDF file name contains your delimiter followed by the real invoice number: [your delimiter][your test invoice number].pdf.

Aiwyn reads the invoice number from the file name, so the delimiter and the number are how Aiwyn matches this email to the invoice you posted in Step 1. Aiwyn doesn't read the contents of the PDF.

You now have an email that meets every sending requirement. For the full list, see Requirements for an invoice to send.

Step 3: Send the email

Send the invoice email from your practice management system.

Because the subject line matches your mail rule, the rule your IT team set up during implementation redirects the email to Aiwyn instead of to the client. Aiwyn picks it up, saves the PDF against your test invoice, wraps the invoice in the Aiwyn invoice email and sends it to your email address.

If the subject line had not matched, your practice management system would have sent the email to your test client as an ordinary email, without the Aiwyn invoice email and without the Pay invoice button.

Step 4: Confirm that Aiwyn has the invoice PDF

In the Firm Portal, select Invoices, search for your test invoice number again, and look at the invoice number. It's now shown in teal text, which means Aiwyn has the PDF. Select the three dots at the end of the invoice's row and select View Invoice. The PDF that opens is the file you attached in Step 2, unchanged. That same file is what your test client can open in their client portal.

If the invoice number is still not in teal after a few minutes, the email didn't reach Aiwyn or Aiwyn couldn't match it to the invoice. Check the four items in Step 2, and see Get a held invoice email sent after you post the invoice. Don't send the email again straight away; see the warning at the end.

Step 5: Confirm that you received the client email

In the Firm Portal, select Clients, then select the Email Delivery Hub tab. Set the date range to include today, set Email Type to Invoice, and search for your test client or your email address. Select the email's row to see each recipient and their delivery status. Within a few minutes of the send, it shows Delivered. When the client opens the email, it changes to Opened, and when they select Pay invoice, to Clicked.

What you see as the test client

You receive an email at the address saved for the test client. It comes from your firm's configured From address and includes your firm's logo banner, the invoice amount and due date, a Pay invoice button that opens the client portal, and the invoice PDF is attached. In the client portal, you can see the test invoice from the client's perspective. Do not complete a payment unless your firm's test process specifically requires it. For every element of the email and where each one comes from, see Anatomy of the 1-click invoice email.

What you did

You posted a test invoice in your practice management system, emailed it to yourself with a subject line and PDF file name that your mail rule and Aiwyn could recognize, and confirmed the flow from both sides: the invoice data and PDF in the Firm Portal, then the client-facing email and portal experience in your own inbox. That is the whole path every Aiwyn invoice email follows: your system creates the invoice and the PDF, Aiwyn matches the two and delivers the email, and your client pays from the email or the portal.

Next steps

• Send multiple invoices to one billing contact in a single email — when one contact should receive several invoices at once.
• Resend an invoice after correcting the PDF — when the invoice changes after you've sent it.
• Resend invoices from Firm Portal — when the client didn't receive the email and the PDF is already in Aiwyn.
• Get a held invoice email sent after you post the invoice — when the email arrived at Aiwyn before the posted invoice did.
• Viewing invoice PDFs — where staff and clients open the PDF.
• Find a specific client email in the Email Delivery Hub — how to find any client email once the hub is turned on for your firm.
• Changes to the Invoice Template in your Practice Management System — what every invoice must contain before you go live.

To understand why the path works the way it does, read How Aiwyn invoice emails work, Why the PDF you send is the PDF your clients see and Requirements for an invoice to send.