An MSP may support one organization operationally while its finance team expects several separate invoices. A group might contain multiple legal entities, franchise locations, or acquired companies that still reconcile independently. Creating a separate client for every bill-to entity fragments the service relationship — contacts, tickets, and assets no longer sit together even though the same MSP team supports them.

Billing profiles keep that organization as one client record while separating invoicing within AlgaPSA. A profile can produce a separate invoice with its own bill-to details, payment method, balance, and billing cycle.

Use billing profiles when the client relationship is shared but the invoice identity is not.

Decide whether you need a billing profile or another client

The deciding question is operational ownership. If the same service organization manages the work, contacts, and assets across the group, billing profiles usually fit. If the organizations need separate service histories, permissions, or operational teams, they should remain separate clients.

Situation	Recommended structure	Why
Separate legal entities in one corporate group	One client with a profile for each entity	Service stays consolidated while invoices carry the correct entity identity.
Franchise locations billed and reconciled independently	One client with a profile for each bill-to location	Each location can follow its own cycle without duplicating the operational relationship.
An acquired company still receives separate invoices	One client with a profile for the acquired company	The MSP can support the combined organization while finance keeps the acquired business distinct.
Internal cost centres that must reconcile separately	One client with a profile for each cost centre	Charges and invoice timing remain attributable to the correct budget owner.
Businesses with unrelated contacts, tickets, assets, and access	Separate clients	Their separation is operational, not only financial.

What stays together and what separates

A billing profile is not a second client record. It is a billing identity beneath the client.

Stays shared at the client level	Separates by billing profile
Contacts and the overall client relationship	Separate invoices when Bills separately is enabled
Tickets and service history	Bill-to name and billing recipient
Assets and supported environment	Billing cycle and payment terms
Overall operational reporting	Balance and financial reconciliation for each bill-to entity

This split lets a dispatcher see all of GreenLeaf Dental Group's tickets in one place while a billing administrator produces separate invoices for its clinics.

Expanding a profile shows Bills separately — "Produce a separate invoice for this profile, with its own bill-to, payment method, and balance". The available profile settings are Bill-to name, Billing email, PO number, Tax ID, Tax exemption certificate, Invoice delivery method, Billing cycle, Payment terms, and Tax exempt. Billing cycle can show Inherited: monthly. Review these settings for each bill-to entity rather than assuming that the parent client's values are correct.

See 14.5. Configure Per-Client Billing Email, Payment Terms, Tax Region, and Invoice Layout for the client-level defaults that form the starting point.

Plan the profile structure before adding contracts

Start with the invoice recipients and reconciliation requirements, not the organization chart. A subsidiary only needs its own profile if it must receive or reconcile billing separately.

For each proposed profile, confirm:

The bill-to name that should appear on its invoices.
The billing cycle finance expects for that entity.
Which contracts and charges belong to it.
Who should review the first invoice after the profile goes live.

Keep profile names recognizable to dispatchers, billing administrators, and client portal users. Consistent names make it easier to assign work and review invoices without opening every profile.

Worked example — GreenLeaf Dental Group

Northwind Managed IT supports GreenLeaf Dental Group as one client. The service desk works across the group, and contacts sometimes open tickets for more than one location. GreenLeaf's finance team, however, reconciles its clinics independently:

Billing profile	Billing responsibility	Example cadence
Default profile	Shared group-level charges	Monthly
Downtown Clinic	Downtown location charges	Monthly
Eastside Clinic	Eastside location charges	Monthly

Northwind keeps one GreenLeaf Dental Group client record. Its contacts, tickets, and assets remain available together. On the client's contracts list, the Billing Profile column lets billing choose Not assigned or one of GreenLeaf's profiles for each contract.

The result is separate financial streams without three copies of the client. A ticket remains within the shared GreenLeaf relationship while its Billing profile property identifies the segment that should receive the charge.

Where billing profiles are used

Profile assignment reaches beyond the Billing profiles card:

The client's contracts list has a Billing Profile column with Not assigned and the client's profile names.
Each ticket has a Billing profile property.
A client location can have a Default billing profile — "New tickets at this location start with this billing profile".
Client portal access can be restricted by Billing segments, controlling which profiles a portal user can see.
The client Billing Dashboard includes Spend by billing profile.

Use these assignments together. A location default helps new tickets start in the right segment, while the ticket property lets staff correct an exception before billing.

Create and configure a billing profile

Go to Clients > GreenLeaf Dental Group > Billing setup > Billing > General > Billing profiles. Select Add a billing profile, name the profile, and configure its billing settings. Rows provide configuration, editing, make-default, archive, and delete actions.

Figure 1: GreenLeaf Dental Group's default, Downtown Clinic, and Eastside Clinic profiles with per-row actions.

Expand the profile and enable Bills separately when it should produce its own invoice. Complete the profile's bill-to, delivery, billing-cycle, payment-term, and tax fields, then save the settings.

Figure 2: Downtown Clinic configured for separate invoicing with profile-specific bill-to, billing-cycle, and payment-term fields.

For each profile:

Use the legal or reconciliation name that finance expects to see.
Confirm whether Inherited: monthly is appropriate or choose the profile's required billing cycle.
Review the billing details that affect invoice delivery and financial treatment.
Associate the relevant contracts and other billable work with the profile.
Preview the first invoice and confirm its profile-specific bill-to and recipient.

If an existing client is moving from one billing identity to several, decide on a clean billing boundary. Finish or account for work already invoiced under the parent, then direct new billing obligations to the appropriate profile. This keeps a single service period from being split unexpectedly during the transition.

AlgaPSA states the attribution rule on the Billing profiles card itself: charges are attributed to a profile through the contract, contract line, or work item they come from, and anything unassigned falls back to the default profile. Changing a contract line's profile shows no warning about charges already recorded, so treat a mid-cycle change as affecting what is billed from that point and reconcile the current draft invoice yourself.

For contract setup, see 14.6. Create MSP Client Contracts with Fixed Fee, Hourly, Usage, and Bucket Billing.

How profiles affect billing cycles and invoices

The billing profile becomes a boundary for invoice timing and identity. Work assigned to Downtown Clinic can follow that profile's cycle, while work assigned to Eastside Clinic follows its own settings. GreenLeaf Dental Group can therefore have more than one billing stream without creating separate client records.

Profiles with Bills separately enabled produce separate invoices. Charges for two such profiles should not be combined merely because they share the same parent client or invoice date. During a billing run, review both the parent client and the profile identity before generating or finalizing documents.

The automatic-invoice view groups candidates under Client / Group. It does not provide a separate billing-profile column or filter, so review the parent client and resulting profile identity before finalizing the draft.

See 14.12. Generate Automatic, Manual, and Prepayment Invoices for MSP Clients for the wider draft-invoice workflow.

On a contract line, the Billing profile selector reads "Charges from this line are billed to this profile, overriding the contract." Its default option is Use the contract's profile; the client's own profiles are listed beneath it.

QuickBooks Online behavior

A profile with Bills separately enabled maps to a QuickBooks sub-customer beneath the client's own customer. This is the point of the mapping rather than a technical detail: a sub-customer's balance rolls up to its parent, so a franchise site invoices and reconciles on its own while the franchise still sees one consolidated position. Creating those profiles as top-level customers instead would break that roll-up.

A profile that does not bill separately has no sub-customer. AlgaPSA says so directly if you try to create one.

Sub-customers carry a qualified name in QuickBooks, in the form Parent:Profile — GreenLeaf Dental Group's Downtown Clinic profile becomes GreenLeaf Dental Group:Downtown Clinic. QuickBooks requires every customer display name in the file to be unique, so a bare Downtown Clinic would collide the first time another client had a similarly named site. The qualified form is also what a bookkeeper scanning the customer list expects to see.

Linking profiles during customer mapping

Separately-billing profiles appear in the same customer-mapping list as their client, directly beside it, rather than on a separate screen. Someone reconciling AlgaPSA clients against the QuickBooks customer list works one list, and a profile whose mapping lived elsewhere would be a profile whose invoices fail to export with no obvious cause.

Two things differ from an ordinary client row:

No suggested match is offered. A sub-customer's name is derived from its parent, so a fuzzy match against the flat QuickBooks customer list would propose links nobody could sanity-check. Link the profile yourself, or create the sub-customer from the row.
The parent is created first. A sub-customer cannot exist without its parent, so AlgaPSA ensures the client's own QuickBooks customer exists and passes it as the parent reference.

QuickBooks Online integration requires Enterprise Edition, and creating a sub-customer requires billing update permission.

See 20.8. Connect QuickBooks Online to AlgaPSA for Live Two-Way Accounting Sync for connection setup.

First-cycle checklist

Confirm every active contract points to the intended billing profile.
Compare each profile's cycle with the client's billing schedule.
Check the bill-to identity and recipient before sending anything.
Preview invoices to make sure charges did not cross profile boundaries.
When QuickBooks Online is connected, check the invoice's QBO # or use View in QuickBooks.
Reconcile the first profile-level balances with the client's finance team before treating the migration as complete.

Navigation

14.27. Invoice Multiple Billing Entities Under One Client with Billing Profiles