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Charges and Invoices Overview

In Siebel Field Service, you can manually or automatically create charges and invoices for service requests, activities, and agreements.

A charge is an expense line item. An invoice is a bill that consolidates a group of charges incurred, or to be incurred, during a specific time period. Charges need to be generated before an invoice can be generated automatically, but not before an invoice can be generated manually. The parameters for consolidating charges into invoices are defined using a charge consolidation plan. Once the charge consolidation plan is defined, invoices can be automatically generated based on the charge consolidation plan. Invoices can also be manually generated.

Invoices for activities can include charges for parts, labor, and expenses. Invoices for service requests incorporate orders, plus the charges for all of the activities related to those particular service requests. Only records that have the Billable flag set are added to the invoice automatically.

Pro forma invoices can be printed onsite for customers and sent to an accounting system to track accounts receivable and revenue. An invoice can also be marked as delinquent, then tracked by the Workflow Manager, which can send automatic reminders to customers or employees.

Each invoice can include these line items:

• Time and materials
• Miscellaneous expenses and tax
• Nonrecurring charges
• Recurring charges
• Use charges
• Project charges
• Credits or other adjustments

Siebel Invoices can be integrated with third-party software to manage taxation for entire invoices or for invoice line items. Without tax integration, Siebel Invoices prepares pro forma invoices, statements of work, or quick reports to customers. The collection of applicable charges and activities is also an efficient way to pass this information to a financial system.

Cost and Price Lists

Siebel Field Service contains a costing infrastructure that allows users to track the costs as they are performed, and then export these costs to financial systems for posting to the general ledger. Previously, service organizations could only estimate the costs of performing service. Now they can associate costs of service calls at the time the service is performed.

The costing infrastructure is based on the creation of cost lists. Cost lists specify the costs of products. Most companies have this information in their financial systems. Incorporating this information into Field Service has the following advantages:

• Costs can be associated with service requests and activities at the time they are performed.
• Costs can be associated with orders for analysis of profitability.
• Cost lists can have time limits, so that they provide an accurate record of costs at the time they occurred.
• Service inventory can be created at any time.

Price lists link cost lists to service requests, orders, and activities. For example, one cost list, North American Costs, describes the costs of products and resources in North America. When a field service engineer chooses a price list for a service request, the associated cost list is automatically linked to the service request.

To learn more about cost lists, price lists, and rate lists, see Pricing Administration Guide.