Sales Invoicing - About Contract Billing

About Contract Billing

The Contract Billing module lets you build a database of the goods and services you sell to customers or internal departments and automatically calculate and apply the correct price for invoicing. The goods and services are set up as items in the system, which in turn can have their own pricing structure based upon the quantity supplied.

Contract Management

A contract defines the agreed charges for items to be supplied to a specific customer within a certain period of time. A customer can have several contracts in force simultaneously.

When creating a contact in the system, you can enter items individually or in groups to define the goods and services supplied under the contract. By attaching an item group to a contract, you can define pricing controls and other information for the entire group and avoid doing the same for each individual item. This feature saves data entry time and exceptions can be made for individual items, if necessary, by entering the exceptional items individually.

Contract items can be invoiced in two ways:

They can be invoiced on a recurring basis. The invoicing due dates are determined by an associated non-fiscal calendar with a defined activity. An example of a recurring contract item is rent. Recurring items are invoiced by the submission of an offline process.
They can be invoiced ad hoc as they are supplied during an overall project. These contract items are entered as part of a job and invoiced after the job is completed. An example of a job is landscaping in an overall renovation project.

Contract items can only be supplied within the defined validity period of the contract.

Job Management

Jobs contain information about contract items that have been supplied to the customer under the terms of the contract and require invoicing. Each contract item, along with other information, is entered onto a job as a job line. Job line entry can be either online or via an offline interface.

Job lines can either be imported into invoices that are being created online, or be used to construct an invoice via the submission of an offline process.

If your organisation performs the same job frequently for different customers, you can create a standard job library in the system to save data entry time. The standard job lines can be imported into new jobs for any customer in only a few keystrokes.

Contract Pricing

After defining item codes in the system, you can create standard item prices to be used automatically and adjusted as needed. You can:

Create a multiple pricing structures for each item and define the hierarchy in which they are used for contract billing
Create pricing structures in multiple currencies
Use different units of measure in a pricing structure
Control the amount of time a standard price is valid
Create price adjustment codes for the quick amendment of standard prices
Create item price with automatic adjustment for start and end of service for part periods.

When you enter an item onto a contract, either alone or as part of an item group, you can use various pricing controls to reflect a non-standard, negotiated price. You can set the system to calculate the standard price per item strictly by a quantity range in a specified pricing structure, or by a weighted average using quantity breaks in the pricing structure.

The pricing controls in a contract also allow you to determine when a price is calculated for an item. Recurring charges can be calculated when the first invoice is generated and unchanged for every invoice thereafter, or recalculated every time an invoice is generated. You can price job lines in one of three ways:

When you enter a job line.
After you enter a job line and submit an offline batch pricing process.
After you enter a job line and generate an invoice for that job line with an offline process.

These options allow you to control the pricing of contract items to adjust, as needed, to the static or fluctuating market cost of an item.

If desired, you can override automatic contract pricing for recurring contract items by entering a price and tax amount manually. All non-recurring contract items are priced automatically using the existing pricing structure and the controls entered on the contract.

NOTE The menu path shown is the default for the system. Your company may have customised menu options, so the path shown may not be accurate. Please contact your system administrator for details.