Billing Terms Overview

Billing terms determine how Vision generates invoices for a particular project. On the Billing Terms form, you enter general project and client information, and specify how Vision calculates labor, expenses, consultant expenses, fees, retainage, and units for each project.

You must set up billing terms for each project for which you want to generate an invoice. If you do not define billing terms, you cannot create invoices.

Billing Terms for Projects with Multiple Levels of Work Breakdown Structure

If your project is subdivided into multiple work breakdown structure levels, you must specify whether the phases, or phases and tasks, will have separate billing terms or will use the terms specified at a higher level (consolidated terms).

You must always establish higher level terms before establishing lower level terms. For example, you must define project-level terms before you can establish phase-level terms, and you must establish phase-level terms before you can establish task-level terms.

When a project is subdivided into phases or phases and tasks, you can:

  • Enter billing terms at the project level only, to apply to all the phase and task-level information. Select this option if you want all project detail to use the same billing terms.
  • Enter separate billing terms at the phase level, to apply to all phase-level information, and all task-level information, if tasks exist. Selet this option if you have phases only and want to define different terms for different phases, or if you have phases and tasks and you want to define different terms for different phases, but you want all tasks within a phase to use the same terms.
  • Enter separate billing terms at the task level, to apply to individual tasks. Select this option to define different billing terms for different tasks.

Billing Terms for Projects Not Yet Approved for Use in Processing

Billing Terms can be set up for projects that are not yet Approved for use in processing on the General tab of the Project Info Center. This allows project managers to establish billing terms before a project is approved by the accounting group. However, you cannot open these projects in Interactive or Batch Billing until they are approved for use in processing

Scheduled Billing Feature

Use the Scheduled Billing feature to invoice fee-based projects based on scheduled invoicing dates and percent completes or dollar amounts.

Billing (Upset) Limits

For each project, phase, or task, you can specify the billing limit terms, also called upset limit terms. An upset limit is a maximum amount above which Vision cannot bill. If a limit has been exceeded, billings still appear on the invoice. An adjustment line, which offsets the amount by which the current billings exceed the limit, appears in the Billing Limits section of the invoice.

Billing Terms Search and Replace

You can use search and replace functions when you enter billing terms. See Search and Replace in the online help for further details.

When you open a project on the Billing Terms form, you can select from a list of all available projects, both with and without billing terms defined.

Determining Which Projects have Billing Terms Defined

To determine which projects have billing terms defined, you can:

  • Check the Missing Billing Terms list, which lists all projects that do not have billing terms.
  • Check for the <New> label on the Billing Terms form which signifies that a project does not have billing terms established at the top level of the work breakdown structure. If you display a lower level component of the work breakdown structure (for example, a phase), <New> displays to the left of the project number if that component has no billing terms established.

Multicurrency

When you select a billing rate table for a project, Vision restricts the list of available rate tables to those with the same currency as the billing currency of the project for which you are establishing billing terms.

Invoice Templates

Vision includes a standard template for formatting invoices, called billInvDefault. The template includes information such as the company name and address, client name and address, project number and name, and task number and name. You can create your own templates with the Invoice Template Editor, which lets you customize the information on your invoices and control how the information is formatted.

Related Topics