Understanding the Billing Process

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

Service Management is integrated with the Accounts Receivable and General Accounting products. The billing process is the same whether billing for contracts or for work orders. Once you set up the billing details in Service Management, the system runs the billing process and updates Accounts Receivable with invoice information and General Accounting with revenue information.

Invoices are based on billable contracts. The first step in the billing process is to accumulate billable contracts. When you run SWM Contract Workfile Generation, the system gathers the contracts that are eligible for billing from the Contract Detail table (F1721), and creates Billing Detail Workfile records (F4812).

You can review billing information for contracts by running the Service Contract Workfile Generation program (R1732) in proof mode and looking at the edit report. After you run proof and final mode, you review billing information in two ways:

• Billing/Amortization Control Inquiry.

• Work with Billing Details form.

You cannot change records after you have run the Contract Workfile Generation program in final mode. The system updates the Contract Detail table (F1721) to reflect billed records. If the records are not processed through the Service Billing program, the accounts receivable records will not match the Service Management records.