Company-wide Billing Settings

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

If you use the Multicompany feature, you usually select Billing configuration settings on a company-by-company basis.

Billing Configuration Area Description

General

In Configuration > Billing > General, you 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.

  • 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 opening 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 Setup at any time. When posting or opening an Interactive Billing session, Vision uses the last saved Billing Setup options.

Default Billing Terms

In Configuration > Billing > Default Terms, you 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, you would 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 opened 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, Vision 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 is going to be billed in a way that is very different from your typical billing practices, you may 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 Configuration > 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. A project may not have billing terms 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 will help 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.