Project Billing Information

Evaluate ceilings, billing formula types, customers, and project tasks when choosing a billing level for the project.  

If your project requires billing ceilings based on the contract or funded value of a specific branch of the project tree, you must place the billing formula at the highest level of the project tree where the values exist.  For example, funding has been issued by the customer for multiple phases of the project, you must place the ceilings in the project tree at or above  the level where the funding for that phase has been entered.  In this case the project tree should have been set up by project phase.

You must evaluate the need for multiple billing formulas before structuring your project and choosing a billing level.  If multiple billing formulas will be needed for the project, then you must enter the billing formula at level two or below in order for the bills to compute properly.

If you have multiple customers on this project you may need to enter the billing formulas at level two or below.  The system has the capability of billing multiple customers without the need for separate tasks.  However, the billing requirements for the customers must be identical in order for this to work properly.  If the billing requirements by customer differs, use separate tasks to accommodate the needs of each customer.  In this case, you must set up the billing level at level two or below.

If the project does not have any of the requirements above, you should set up the billing at the top level of the project as this is the easiest way to bill.

If you have posted transactions to your project before you have established your billing formula in this screen, you must follow some additional steps in order to bill the project.  Use the following steps to enable project billing for this project:

1. Evaluate the Open Billing Detail screen (Projects\Maintain\Billing) for this project.  If any transactions exist in this screen for the project in question, you must take them into consideration when you complete the steps noted here.  You may want to delete any transactions found in the Open Billing Detail screen so that there will be no possibility of duplicate billing.

2. Set up a transaction based billing formula in the Project Billing Information screen.  A transaction based billing formula includes all formulas available in this screen except "Enter Bill Manually" and "Unit Price Transactions Only."  

3. Use the Update Open Billing Detail process (Projects\Utilities\Project Toolkits) to populate the Open Billing Detail screen with transactions for this project.  We recommend that you run this utility for only one project at a time.  The utility will not evaluate the presence of transactions in the Open Billing Detail screen.  It will simply use the general ledger detail table to populate the Open Billing Detail screen.  For more information on the use of this utility see the screen documentation for the Update Open Billing Detail.

A transaction-based billing formula is one that is billed according to the transactions that were charged to the project.  The transactions-based billing formulas include all the formulas in this screen except "Enter Bill Manually" and "Unit Transactions Only."

Multiple billing formulas can be set up within a single project as long as the project is structured so that billing formulas are not stacked.  The system will not let you enter a higher level billing formula if it finds another billing formula at a lower level of the project tree.  

Structure the project so that the billing formulas can be entered at level two or below and all the tasks below the billing level fall below the desired billing formula type in the project structure.

You can enter manual bills in the Enter Project Product Bills (Projects\Transactions\Billing), Enter Milestone/Percent Complete Bills (Projects\Transactions\Billing), Enter Customer Product Bills (Projects\Transactions\Billing), or Enter Manual Bills (Projects\Transactions\Billing) screens.  You must, however, establish a billing record in this screen before you can create manual bills in those screens.  

The Edit Progress Payment Bills screen (Projects\Transactions\Billing) exists for projects that will be billed using Government form 1443.

Select the "Progress Payment Bills" formula if you need to produce Government Form 1443.

Use the Bill Cost Incurred on Cash Basis checkbox in this screen to set up the project for cash basis billing.  Once you have selected this checkbox, the system will evaluate the Cash Basis subtask of the Open Billing Detail screen before including the transactions on the bill.  

The Cash Basis subtask of the Open Billing Detail screen is populated by the Update Cash Basis Bills process.  This process evaluates transactions that are entered through Accounts Payable only.  All other transactions will be considered paid when posted.

 The Update Cash Basis Bills process uses the accounts that have been identified in the Billing Accounts screen to determine which accounts are subject to cash basis rules.  You can enter more accounts that are subject to cash basis in the Cash Basis subtask of this screen.  The account should not be entered in both places.   

You must run the Update Cash Basis Bills process before calculating the bills.

You can set up a project to be billed in a foreign currency by selecting that currency in the Billing Currency field in the Other Info subtask.  You must have already set up the rate information in the Multicurrency Exchange Rate screen.

The Calculate Bills process will use the information in the Multicurrency Exchange Rate screen to convert the transactions in the Open Billing Detail table to the billing currency.  

You must set up a billing formula for your project in this screen if you intend to bill the project using any of the manual billing processes.  You should use the "Enter Bill Manually" formula in most cases.

If you need to use the Pay When Paid feature, you should select the "Manual Bills with Unbilled Detail" formula.  This billing formula allows you to use one of the manual billing screens and it populates the Open Billing Detail screen (Projects\Maintain\Billing). The data in the Open Billing Detail screen is used to evaluate the "pay when paid" status of individual transactions.

You will only need to enter billing history in the system if you need to present a cumulative column on your bill, produce reversing bills, use billing ceilings, or calculate revenue based on billings.  If you do not need to do any of these, simply set up the billing formula and begin producing bills for the project.

Enter cumulative billing data in the Maintain Billing History screen.  You can use your last invoice from the former system and enter data into the Maintain Billing History screen by billing line.  An invoice can then be produce that will have a cumulative amount by billing line.  This screen is also used to calculate total billing ceilings.

Enter, or use Lookup to select, a valid project for which billings must be calculated, or for which billings will be manually entered into the system. The non-editable field to the right displays the project name.

Think carefully about your project number before you enter it. The project number you enter here will establish the top level of the billing. Also consider the billing formula, retainage requirements, and formats. If you want all of these things to be consistent for the entire project tree, you should establish project billing at level one of the project. However, if some tasks of the projects posses unique billing requirements, consider billing at lower levels of the project tree. Generally, you should perform this type of analysis when you are establishing the project structure.

All transactions entered at the billing level defined here and below will be included on an invoice when bills are calculated. Any transactions that are entered above the level established here will not be included on the invoice when bills are calculated.