Siebel Field Service Guide > Charges and Invoices >

About Charges and Invoices

You can manually or automatically create charges and invoices for service requests, activities, and agreements. For more information, see About Agreements and About Entitlements.

A charge is an expense item. An invoice is a bill that summarizes a group of incurred charges, or future charges, during a specific time period. You can consolidate all the charges for an individual account into a single invoice, and then send an invoice to each account.

Charges must be generated before an invoice can be automatically generated, but not before you can manually generate an invoice. You can use a charge consolidation plan to define the parameters for consolidating charges into invoices. After you define the charge consolidation plan, you can use it to automatically generate invoices.

Invoices for activities can include charges for parts, labor, and expenses. Invoices for service requests incorporate orders and the charges for all of the activities related to the service requests. Only records with selected Billable check boxes are automatically added to the invoice.

You can print pro forma invoices onsite for customers, and send them to an accounting application to track accounts receivable and revenue. If an invoice is delinquent, then the Workflow Manager can track it and send automatic reminders to customers or employees.

Each invoice can include the following line items:

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

You can integrate Siebel Invoices with third-party applications to manage taxation for entire invoices or for invoice line items. Without tax integration, Siebel Invoices prepares pro forma invoices, statements of work, and reports to customers. You can collect applicable charges and activities to efficiently pass this information to a financial application.