Billing overview

3PL billing turns the work your warehouse does for each client into an invoice. You describe how a client is billed once, in a billing profile. LogisticaHQ then reads the client's storage and activity for a period, applies the profile's rules, and creates an invoice that you review, post, and send.

All 3PL billing screens are under Setup > 3PL: Clients, Billing profiles and Invoices.

Key concepts

Clients

A client is a company whose inventory you store and handle. Clients are kept under Setup > 3PL > Clients. The client record matters to billing in three ways:

• The client's company name and address are copied into the Bill to section of every invoice.
• The client's Email is where invoices are sent when you email them.
• Users of the client's portal can see the client's posted invoices.

The client screen has no billing settings of its own. A client is billed through the billing profiles that point to it.

Billing profiles

A billing profile is the rate card for one client. It holds:

• A name and the client it bills.
• The billing rules that produce invoice lines.
• The additional charges and discounts, such as a sales tax.
• Optional recurring settings: the billing cycle, the date the next cycle starts, and whether invoices are posted and emailed automatically.

A client can have more than one profile, for example one for storage and one for transport. You can clone a profile, with all its rules, onto another client.

Billing rules

Each rule adds one or more lines to the invoice. Every line has an Item, a Description, a Rate and a Quantity, and its total is Rate × Quantity. There are three rule types.

Rules run in alphabetical order of their names, and the invoice lines follow that order.

Storage calculation methods

A Storage rule measures inventory with one of these calculation methods. The rule's rate is charged per unit of the measure, per day.

You can limit a Storage rule to certain zones and to all products, a product category, or a list of SKUs.

Additional charges, discounts and taxes

Additional charges are named percentages kept on the profile, for example ITBMS at 7%. A charge applies only to the lines that name it. Flat and Storage rules name their charges in the rule's Additional Charges field. Service rules name them in the query's AdditionalCharges column. A discount is entered the same way, with a negative percentage.

LogisticaHQ has no separate tax or currency field. Taxes such as the Panamanian ITBMS are set up as additional charges. Amounts are shown in the $ format.

The invoice totals work like this:

• Sub total = the sum of all line totals.
• For each charge, the amount = (the sum of the totals of the lines that name it) × its percentage.
• Total = Sub total + all charge amounts.

Billing periods and cycles

Every invoice covers a period from a start date up to, but not including, an end date. The end date is the first day of the next period. For example, the September 2026 invoice runs from 2026-09-01 to 2026-10-01.

A profile can generate invoices automatically on one of three cycles:

• Monthly: from the first day of a month to the first day of the next month.
• Weekly: seven days starting on a Monday.
• Bi Weekly: fourteen days starting on a Monday.

Invoices

An invoice has one of two states:

• Draft: you can edit it, re-generate its lines, or delete it.
• Posted: it is final. It cannot be edited, re-generated, deleted, or returned to Draft.

Invoice numbers are the invoice number prefix followed by a seven-digit sequence, for example INV-0000027.

When an invoice is created, LogisticaHQ also saves a snapshot of the client's storage movements and service activity for the period. This snapshot is saved only if record capture is turned on (see Setting Up 3PL Billing). Storage rules and many Service rules read this snapshot. The PDF also prints it as an annex, so the client can see what was billed.

What the client sees

Client portal users with access to invoices see an Invoices page. It lists only Posted invoices, and they can open or download each one as PDF or Excel. Draft invoices are never shown in the portal.

How it fits together

1. Turn on record capture and review the invoice number and email settings in Setup > System > Configuration.
2. Check that the client under Setup > 3PL > Clients has a company name, an address and an email.
3. Create a billing profile for the client under Setup > 3PL > Billing profiles.
4. Add rules (Flat, Storage and Service) and any additional charges, such as ITBMS.
5. Generate an invoice for a period, either manually or on a recurring cycle.
6. Review the Draft invoice. Edit lines or re-generate them if a rule changed.
7. Post the invoice. Posting is final.
8. Email the invoice or download it as PDF or Excel. The client sees posted invoices in the portal.