Billing schedules
Billing schedules provide a way for you to automatically charge customers for recurring costs. You can define billing schedules to create bill batches for recurring costs for fixed fees, items, services, scheduled usage, actual usage, and managed assets.
You can have monthly automated billing schedules for recurring work in addition to the manual bill batches that you create for transactions on work orders or tickets. Billing schedules define the terms of automated monthly billing and ensure that customers are billed every month, on a specified day. Billing schedules are part of customer agreements, and, with the parameters of the agreements, define the prices and billing terms for recurring work.
You can have multiple billing schedules on an agreement. For example, a building management company might set up billing schedules to bill customers for monthly fixed fees associated with renting the set space out each month. They might also have billing schedules to bill customers for scheduled maintenance fees, such as grounds maintenance, and on-call maintenance work such as repairs.
You can view scheduled bills to see the projected prices for recurring customer costs and project regular revenue on customer agreements. For example, manufacturers that sell equipment and agreements to maintain the equipment can list the items and prices on the agreement and automatically bill the customers those prices each month.
The monthly bill batches that are created as part of the billing schedules process are separate from the manual bill batches. For manual bill batches, you must create the sales orders manually, whereas with automated billing, the sales orders are created automatically. Unlike manual bill batches, automated bills batches typically do not require review and are sent directly to the customers.
Types of billing schedules
- Fixed fee billing
- Item billing
- Service item billing
- Scheduled usage billing
- Actual usage billing
- Managed assets billing
When the customer agreement is approved, a sales order is created for each fixed fee, item, service item, scheduled usage, actual usage, or managed asset charge on the billing schedule. Prices are calculated according to the pricing rules that are defined for the billing schedule. The sales orders are then copied to the bill batch.
A bill batch is created on the specified next bill date for each billing schedule on the agreement.
For the first run, the bill batch is created at the earliest time after the first bill date. The bill batch status is set to the status that you specify when you create the billing schedule.
You can modify a billing schedule if the customer agreement is in Draft, WAPPR (waiting for approval), or PNDREV (pending review) status. You cannot change the billing schedule if the final bill date is in the past.
You can delete a billing schedule only if a bill batch was never created for it and there is no billing history.
Diagram of the billing schedules process
