A billing schedule defines the schedule to bill sales over a range of time or a contract term. You could bill monthly for the sale of a one-year membership or bill quarterly for a three-year service contract. It manages the billing process by tracking when to invoice customers and how much to bill.
Billing schedules can be applied to an entire sales order, or a different billing schedule can be selected for each line item on the sales order. Billing schedules can be added to an item record so that it automatically shows a sales order when that term is actually selected.
Considerations of Usage:-
- How frequently do you bill(Invoice) your customer?
- Do you need to apply a schedule at the header level(per sale) or at the line level (per item)?
- Do you have multiple patterns for billing?
- Do you need to develop pro-rata billing schedules?
- Do you need to cancel billing schedules once they are started?
- Do you use advanced projects?
- How is billing done for work undertaken as part of a project?
Feature Enablement
Enable the feature in the company account, for that navigate to setup –> company –> enable features –> transaction tab –> Advanced Billing.
Different types of Billing Schedules
There are five different types of billing schedules. They are going to be determined by the features you’ve enabled.
Standard
- Anything you want uneven periods, uneven amounts per period.
- Used on sales orders only.
- Breaks the sales order into separate bills according to the schedule.
- Bills generated can be either invoices or cash sales.
- The billing schedule records details like type, initial amount and payment terms, Recurrence frequency, and count, and optionally set the payment terms. Also the in arrears checkbox.
Fixed Bid Interval
- Project Use only
- Invoice at pre-defined intervals
- Bills are in arrears only.
- NetSuite calculates the number of billing cycles based on the duration of the project and the billing recurrence frequency
- The percent work complete as of the bill date for each project item determines the amount billed.
Fixed Bid Interval
- Specific project use only.
- Can only be created from the project record.
- Invoice in increments when project milestones are reached.
Time and Materials
- Project use only
- Bill customers for actual time worked on a project and those material costs
- Billing dates are driven by the frequency selected in the billing schedule.
- The billing schedule records details like type, Recurrence frequency, and count, and optionally set the payment terms. Also the in arrears checkbox.
Charge Based
- Project Use only
- Create charges that you can bill to your customers
- Charges rules determine the billing rate, the timing of the charge, and the stage of a charge when it is generated.
- Can be either fixed for time-based or expense.
You could also link the billing schedules to cash sales. This would be controlled by the form that you’re using when you’re entering the sales order. If the sales order or the cash sales form is used when billed according to the schedule, it will result in a cash sale transaction rather than an invoice.
We can link a billing schedule to an item. So you can assign a schedule on item record, and then when the item is chosen on the sales transaction, the billing schedule is applied at the header level, then the entire sales order will be billed according to the schedule, regardless of how many items are included in the sales order. We can also apply a billing schedule to a specific line item. So you could apply a billing schedule to an individual line item on a transaction.
Best Practises
- Avoid creating the single-line billing schedule- if the sales order is to be billed in one installment leave the billing schedule blank.
- Create a naming convention for billing schedules that adequately identify them.