Recurring Templates Overview
The most reliable automation in accounting is the boring kind: documents that repeat, generated on schedule, perfectly, forever. One Recurring Template engine drives all of it in REDA Financials — four document types, one pattern, one nightly batch. Meridian runs three templates and hasn't typed a rent invoice, an electricity bill shell, or a monthly accrual since.
Access you'll need. Creating and editing recurring templates requires the Accounting Admin v2 or Accounting Controller v2 permission set. The Accounts Payable v2, Accounts Receivable v2, and Read Only v2 sets can view templates but not change them.
What can recur
| Document Type | Classic use | Deep-dive |
|---|---|---|
| Sales Invoice | Monthly rent, subscriptions, service retainers | Recurring Sales Invoices |
| Purchase Invoice | Predictable vendor bills — Meridian's electricity shell arrives as a draft to true-up and post | Recurring AP Documents |
| Purchase Order | Standing orders — the quarterly janitorial PO | same article |
| Journal Entry | Fixed accruals, amortizations, allocations | Recurring Journal Entries |
Two nuances hide in that table. A Sales Invoice template carries its own Sales Invoice Type choice — Invoice or Receipt — so the same engine covers ordinary billed invoices and receipt-style cash sales. And there is deliberately no credit-memo option: a credit memo is a correction, corrections are judgment calls, and judgment doesn't belong on a schedule. When a recurring arrangement needs adjusting, you credit the individual invoice, never a template.
The shared shape
- A template is a frozen document — header + lines, exactly as each generated copy should look, owned by one entity. (Journal templates must balance; invoice templates need lines before activation.)
- A schedule — frequency from daily to annually, a start date, and an end (date, a set number of occurrences, or open-ended). Next Run Date always shows what happens next; Completed Count tallies history.
- A decision about trust — Auto Post off (drafts for review — the default posture) or on (documents post themselves — for the truly fixed).
- A paper trail — every generated document links back to its template; the template's related lists are the full history.
The life of one template: Corvus's rent, January to June
Meridian Properties Group leases Suite 1201 to Corvus Consulting at $9,000 a month. One Sales Invoice template — monthly, starting January 1st, Auto Post off — carries the whole arrangement:
| Date | What the batch did | Template afterwards |
|---|---|---|
| Jan 1 | Generated the first draft invoice; AR reviewed and posted it that morning | Next Run Date Feb 1 · Completed Count 1 |
| Feb 1 – Apr 1 | Three more generations, one per month, each a draft linked back to the template | Next Run Date May 1 · Completed Count 4 |
| May 1 | Nothing — an admin had unscheduled the batch during a maintenance weekend | Next Run Date still May 1 — due, waiting, not lost |
| May 3 | Admin runs the card's Run Now with the current date: everything due on or before it sweeps up — May's invoice generates two days late, correctly dated and numbered | Next Run Date Jun 1 · Completed Count 5 |
| Jun 1 | Back on schedule, quietly | Next Run Date Jul 1 · Completed Count 6 |
Six months, one template, zero typed invoices — and the one operational hiccup healed with a single click because "due" means on or before, never "missed forever". Every generated invoice sits on the template's related list, the full history in one place.
The Auto Post decision, honestly
Every template asks one trust question. The pragmatic ladder:
- Start with Auto Post off. The batch generates drafts; your team reviews and posts through their normal queues. You lose nothing but the review time — and you keep the remembering, the numbering, the schedule.
- Graduate the truly fixed. After a few cycles of drafts that never needed touching — the rent that is exactly $9,000 every month — switch Auto Post on and the documents post themselves at generation.
- Never graduate the variable. Meridian's electricity template stays draft-only forever: the shell recurs, the amount is trued up against the actual bill before posting. Recurring the structure while reviewing the numbers is a legitimate steady state, not a failure to automate.
The guardrails, verbatim
| The message | What it means |
|---|---|
| "Document Type cannot be changed once a Recurring Template has been saved." | The type decision is permanent — a rent template can't morph into a journal template. Create a new template instead. |
| "An Active Journal Entry recurring template must have at least one line." | Activation requires a complete, generatable document — empty templates stay Draft. |
| "Total Debit (…) must equal Total Credit (…)" | Journal templates must balance before they're allowed to generate — the balance rule applies to the pattern, not just the copies. |
| "No active templates are due on or before this date. The batch will run but generate no documents." | The manual-run warning when there's simply nothing to do — a run with no work is harmless. |
Common mistakes to avoid
| Mistake | Why it hurts | Do this instead |
|---|---|---|
| Templating a variable-amount arrangement with Auto Post on | Wrong numbers post themselves, punctually, every month | Recur the shell with Auto Post off; true up each draft before posting |
| Editing the template to handle a one-month exception | The exception becomes the new normal — next month generates the exception again | Adjust the generated draft for the odd month; edit templates only for permanent changes |
| Deactivating a template to "skip one run" and forgetting it | Nothing generates for months; the customer stops being billed silently | Skip deliberately, then reactivate — and note that the backfill sweep will pick up what came due while paused, so time the reactivation consciously |
| One mega-template you keep editing for multiple arrangements | History becomes unreadable — which edits served which deal? | One arrangement, one template ("Corvus rent" and "Corvus parking" are two templates) |
| Nobody watches the generated drafts | With Auto Post off, generation only creates work-in-waiting — unposted drafts age quietly | Make the generated-drafts queue part of a named person's daily rhythm |
Where to go next
- Template Configuration — every field, and the lifecycle.
- Recurring Batch Scheduler — the engine room.
- Recurring Sales Invoices — the most common case, in full.
Frequently asked questions
Anything variable enough that reviewing the draft costs as much as typing it — and corrections (credit memos can't recur, deliberately). The sweet spot: same parties, same lines, price stable for months at a time.
Yes: edit the template when the price changes (future runs use it, history untouched) — or keep Auto Post off and adjust each draft. The automation's value is the remembering, not just the typing.
Accounting Admins and Controllers create and edit templates; the operational teams consume the generated documents through their normal queues. AP, AR and Read Only users can view templates but not change them.
Neither. The batch runs as the system's automated user, so generation doesn't occupy anyone's seat — and the AI document meter counts OCR intake only; recurring generation isn't an AI feature and is never metered.
It retires: the end date passes or the occurrence count completes, and the batch stops selecting it. Nothing is deleted — the template and its full generated history stay on file, which is exactly what you want when the lease renews and you need last year's pattern.
No — generation is idempotent per template and date. Running the batch again for the same date finds nothing left due and creates nothing. Run Now when unsure; it's safe by design.
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