RSS feedInvoicing can be an important part of the administrative work in a consulting company. This is particularly true if the company bills their customer on a per-effort base. This document explains the different billing scenarios and how they are covered by ]project-consulting[.
Supported Billing Cases:
"Fixed price" projects is the easiest type of billing in ]project-consulting[: The provider (you) sends a quote document (MS-Word, PDF, ...) to a customer, quoting a number of products and services. To keep track of this quote you create a "quote" object in ]pc[ with the same quoted price and (more or less) with the same structure.
You create such a quote by manually filling in a number of invoice lines. We call this "Create Quote From Scratch", meaning that the quote is not created from any underlying data.
Finally, once the project has finished you are going to send your customer an invoice. This invoice will probably look much like the initial quote but may contain some changes. This is the reason why we have included a function called "Create Invoice from Quote". This function uses your quote as a template but gives you full control to manually modify all elements, add new invoice lines etc.
This is a variant of the "fixed price" project. Imagine that you have agreed an explicit payment schedule in your original quote document with three partical payments.
]pc[ offers you all the support for this scenario that there is - it let's you write your three invoices manually, one-by-one. This is the only reasonable solution here, because the system can not reasonalby take any assumption about how you want to distribute the money between the payments etc.
However, the "Financial Controlling" (-> PO-Finance-Guide) functionality allows you to check a posteriori the the sum of the three invoices is equal to the initial quote.
Some consulting/ service companies have to deal with a big number of relatively small projects. Examples may be advertizing agencies, translation agencies, property management companies etc.
For these companies it is impractial to create a separate invoice for each project. Instead, they want usually write periodic invoices that cover several projects at a time.
]pc[ supports this billing mode by allowing you to include multiple projects in a single invoice via the "Create Invoice from Timesheet Tasks" wizard. Please see the image above for a screenshot from our PcDemo online demo server.
Cost based projects are usually billed by the number of days or hours that the provide has been working on the the projects.
To capture these efforts, ]pc[ includes a timesheet management system which allows employees to log their hours on project tasks. The accountant can aggregate these hours at the end of the project and create an invoices based on the total time spent.
This is a variant of the "cost base billing". Many service companies provide their customers with maintenance services for a deliverable from a previous project. These maintenance services are billed periodically to the customers.
In order to use this billing mode we recommend you to setup a new project or sub-project for each maintenance period. At the end of the period you bill the customer just like in "cost based billing" and you close the (sub-) project.
]pc[ supports the concept of "repeating financial items", such as a service contract, a rental contract etc. Repeating financial items can be included in an invoice similar to the "Many Small Projects" case.
A very important function of ]pc[ billing is guarantee that each item is billed exactly once. Multiple billing must be avoides as well as "forgetting" to bill an item.
In order to provide guarantee this consistency, ]pc[ keeps track of the relationship between billable items and invoices.
Also, ]pc[ removes projects from the timesheet module if it has been closed for billing.
Please don't hesitate to contact us if you have doubts or questions. We are very interested to hear your opinion or your feedback, both positive or negative.
