Company-wide Billing Settings

Before you enter billing terms for individual projects, you must define company-wide billing settings. You must also define company-wide tax codes for use on all invoices, as well as in other Vantagepoint applications.

If you have multiple companies, you usually specify billing settings on a company-by-company basis.

Billing Settings Area	Description
General	In Settings > Billing > Options, enter settings for your invoices and for Interactive Billing sessions. Examples are: Invoice printing options, such as whether to print the company name and where to position the address on the invoice. An invoice numbering system. Interactive Billing session options settings, such as the default settings for disabling upset limits, and whether or not users can change this default when starting a billing session. Labels for various accounts, such as Fees, when you use the fee billing method. Invoice accounts to use for various types of billing methods. Whether or not to release invoice holds automatically. Whether to enable or disable the Invoice Approvals feature. You can change general billing settings in Billing Settings at any time. When posting or opening an Interactive Billing session, Vantagepoint uses the last saved Billing Settings.
Default Billing Terms	In Settings > Billing > Default Terms, set up the default billing terms for all of the company's projects. For example, if your company usually bills based on time and materials, set up your default billing terms to reflect typical time and materials billing practices. Default billing terms act as a template for creating individual billing terms for new projects. When you open a new project from the Billing Terms form, the form is populated with the defaults. After you save the project, the default terms become the project's individual terms. If the project has phases (or phases and tasks), and you choose to add billing terms at the phase or task level, Vantagepoint also populates the sub-levels with these default terms. You still need to enter billing information that is specific to the project, such as the client's name and billing address. If a project will be billed in a way that is different from your typical billing practices, you might need to enter entirely new billing terms. You can also copy existing project billing terms to create billing terms for a new project.
Reporting Default Terms	In Settings > Billing > Reporting Default Terms, you enter default reporting terms for reports that are based on billing rates. You can also use reporting default terms to generate revenue for projects that have no billing terms defined. To bill a project, or to calculate revenue, you must define billing terms for that project. However, you can create reports or generate revenue for projects that do not have billing terms, by using Reporting Default Terms. You might decide not to specify billing terms for a project if: You never want to bill the project. Billing terms have not yet been defined. In these cases, you can use Reporting Default Terms. You can also use Reporting Default Terms to create a report that helps you determine how much to bill for a fee-based contract. In this case, you use labor, expense, and/or unit billing amounts to calculate the fee, but don't show these amounts on invoices.