Hi all,
We are working on an implementation where everything is billed in advance.
Projects is being used to track costs/revenue and margins and we would like to setup the Project to Bill in advance for next month.
However, I cannot see an easy way to do this. We setup monthly recurring billing on our Projects and then when we go to the Run Project Billing screen, it only lets us bill retrospectively.
I've tried changing the next billing date to today when setting up the project, which seems to work, but in the Run Project Billing screen the from and to dates show as being this past month. So it still looks like we are Billing retrospectively.
As a bit of extra info, we are using Acumatica to track on monthly/quarterly/yearly Software subscriptions. We are billed by the suppliers in advance and need to ideally be able to Bill the Clients in advance.
Any help and advice would be greatly appreciated.
Many thanks,
Billing Projects in Advance
Best answer by Laura03
I see, with Billing Date set to July 30, you’d like the Billing From/To Dates to be Aug. 1 to Aug. 31.
The dates in Run Project Billing screen are automatically filled by Acumatica, based on the first Unbilled period.
This example is from Acumatica Sales Demo tenant, where I noticed projects with Billing Period set to On Demand do not produce automatic Billing From/To dates in Run Project Billing screen. Did you already test project billing with an On Demand billing period?
Possibly, the Billing From/To dates could be changed via customization, to display a future range of dates or to prompt the user at the top of the screen where the standard Run Project Billing screen asks only for Invoice Date and Post Period.
Laura
+19Hello,
What kind of Billing Rule are you using? There are examples of Fixed Price and Progress Billing rules in Acumatica demo companies.
If you are using Time & Materials billing, is the cost for software subscriptions from your suppliers being allocated to the projects on a monthly basis, labor being allocated monthly, then marked up and invoiced (versus posting real Time labor hours to the project) ?
I hope the answers to these billing rule questions might lead us to your answer.
Best,
Laura
Hi Laura,
I really appreciate your quick reply on this.
We currently have this setup using Progress billing, however this can be changed since we are not yet live with the system.
We are dealing with support and labour on separate projects for now, our main focus is to get the Software subscriptions up and running.
The ideal scenario is:
- we setup a new software subscription project (with monthly/yearly recurring billing)
- we get billed in advance by Supplier
- we then bill the Customers in advance
So if a project were setup today, the first bill would be generated today when we run project billing and it would cover the next month (August).
I really appreciate any help and advice that you can give.
Many thanks,
Jeremy
+19Hello,
What you are describing seems like Contract billing to me (might be worthwhile to investigate this option - see U tube). Though progress billing may work too, example:
Project Revenue is $12,000 annually.
$1000 or 8.33% is billed each month via progress billing. Billing cycle could be 1st of month, or billed on last day of previous month for the coming month. Each project’s % complete to be billed will be updated by a user on Revenue budget of the projects, then run Billing for the projects. I’ve seen some questions on this community containing options for importing the %Complete, in case there are too many to update manually.
It sounds like % complete/progress billing might be what you are doing - why isn’t it working?
Hi Laura,
Thanks again for your swift reply.
Yes as you say it is more like contract Billing, the issue is that we cannot allocate costs to Contracts, so we are unable to easily track the margins like we can on the Projects. This is why we have chosen to use Projects so that we can allocate our POs and track revenue to give us a margin %.
The bit I’m struggling with is getting the Billing period to be in advance.
For example, I setup a project today, and set the next billing date to today. When I go to run project billing (the process screen), it shows that I'm billing for this month (July):
I’m hoping I’m missing something obvious here. The project wasn’t open until today, so why would it be trying to bill for the last month?
Again, really appreciate your help and responses.
Many thanks,
Jeremy
+19I see, with Billing Date set to July 30, you’d like the Billing From/To Dates to be Aug. 1 to Aug. 31.
The dates in Run Project Billing screen are automatically filled by Acumatica, based on the first Unbilled period.
This example is from Acumatica Sales Demo tenant, where I noticed projects with Billing Period set to On Demand do not produce automatic Billing From/To dates in Run Project Billing screen. Did you already test project billing with an On Demand billing period?
Possibly, the Billing From/To dates could be changed via customization, to display a future range of dates or to prompt the user at the top of the screen where the standard Run Project Billing screen asks only for Invoice Date and Post Period.
Laura
+8
I tried to see if setting the billing period to month with the next billing date set to 8/1/2024 but when i did that, the to/from periods were shown as 8/1-9/1 which is the month prior not the upcoming month:
Based off what i read up above, that’s wouldn’t fit your business requirement.
from the form reference, I found this regarding the next billing date and period:
It seems the native behavior for the billing period is to reference the prior month, not in the future:
i agree with
Thank you both very much for your replies,
It seems that perhaps a small customisation might fit, but in the short term hiding the From and To dates on the Run Billing screen should suffice, since this will always be incorrect on our projects.
I really appreciate you taking the time to try and help me figure this out, very much appreciated!!
Jeremy
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