Projects and Milestone Billing
You can bill customers for project work at milestone intervals. Instead of being based on the materials used and time worked on the project, billing amounts are based on reaching preset project goals, or billing milestones. To use milestone billing, select Fixed Bid, Milestone as the billing type on the project. Then, create a new billing schedule that is a Fixed Bid, Milestone type schedule. For more information, see Creating a Milestone Billing Schedule.
You must enable Project Management and Advanced Billing to use milestone billing.
For details on consolidated projects and milestone billing, see Fixed Bid, Milestone Project Billing with Consolidation.
Fixed Bid, Milestone Billing Schedules
Milestone projects bill customers for amounts based on reaching preset goals, or billing milestones in the project. Milestones mark a point in time that must be reached to trigger the associated billing. Then, you invoice customers for a portion of the total project amount.
For example, you contract to sell a customer to sell widgets and to install them in their offices in three phases. When you complete Phase One of the installation, you want to bill the customer for the work completed in Phase One, but not yet bill for Phase Two. Using Milestone Billing, you can bill for each phase as the work is completed.
Billing with Fixed Bid, Milestones schedules is similar to using a standard billing schedule with custom billing dates. You can specify the bill date for a milestone or link it to the completion of a task within the project.
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When it is linked to a project task, the bill date automatically updates when the expected completion date of the linked project task changes.
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When the milestone is marked complete, the amount associated with the milestone is available for billing. If the milestone is linked to a project task, then the milestone is marked as complete when the task is complete. Otherwise, the milestone must be manually marked complete on the billing schedule.
Define milestones when you create the billing schedule and optionally link them to project tasks. Assign a percentage of the total amount to be billed when the milestone task is completed. A Fixed Bid, Milestone schedule selected on a project is always private and used only for the project it is associated with.
To create revenue recognition schedules for fixed bid milestone billing schedules, you must select revenue recognition templates whose term source is not based on a billing schedule. For information about revenue recognition term sources, see Understanding Revenue Recognition Template Terms.
Monitoring Milestone Billing Using Saved Searches
Create a saved search and publish the results to your dashboard to monitor billing milestones for your projects. This eliminates the need to open each billing schedule to check the status of project milestones and billing. For example, you can create a saved search to track uncompleted milestones and late milestones directly on your dashboard. Or you can display a list of milestones for all projects by expected completion date.
To create a search to filter projects by billing milestones, select the appropriate milestone billing fields when setting up an advanced search for projects. Billing milestone fields exposed as related record fields in the Project search criteria include:
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Actual Completion Date
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Amount
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Comments
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Estimated Completion Date
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Project Task
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Terms
Then publish the saved search to your dashboard. For information, see Defining an Advanced Search and Displaying Saved Search Results in Dashboard Portlets.