Understanding Contract Billing for Service Management

The typical billing process includes accumulating contracts to bill, creating and printing invoices, and recording journal entries for income and receivables.

When you generate the contract workfile, the system gathers the contracts that are eligible for billing from the Contract Detail table (F1721) and creates records in the Billing Detail Workfile (F4812). After you generate the billing workfile, you must continue the standard service billing process.

To group workfile transactions and assign invoice numbers, you run the Invoice Processing program, which summarizes one or more workfile transactions into pay item records. Pay items are the billing lines that are the total amount of a specific invoice.

The system stores pay item information in the Invoice Summary Work File table (F4822) and updates the workfile transaction records with the new invoice information, and the sequence and summarization key information.

After you run the Invoice Processing Program, you can print invoices for customers.

To complete the billing process, you must create AR and GL entries. You first create preliminary AR and GL entries using the Invoice Journal Generation program (R48131). You then can review the resulting reports, which are the Billing Journal Register and the Invoice Journal Generation Report, to determine whether the entries were generated with errors.

After you ensure that no errors are within the batch, you can create the final AR entries using the Create A/R Entries program (R48199). Then you can post the invoices to the general ledger.