Using Consolidated Billing for Projects and for Payments

Consolidated billing consists of a set of accounting features and preferences that affect the way you invoice your customers and accept payments toward those invoices.

These features and preferences are described below:

Consolidate Projects on Sales Transactions – When you enable this preference, you can create sales orders and bill customers for charges associated with multiple projects on a single invoice. A Project column appears on sales transactions in the list of items so that each item or expense can be attributed to a particular project.
- You cannot issue sales transactions directly to projects. You can only issue sales transactions to customers and subcustomers.
- If you use Project Management, one project is created for each project-tagged line-item on sales transactions.
When you clear this box, you can associate all items on a sales transaction with only one customer or project. You can issue sales transactions to both customers and projects. If you use Project Management, one project is created that contains all project-tagged line-items on the order.
Consolidated Payments – Enable this feature to accept payments for projects or subcustomers either through top-level customer or the individual subcustomer. Multiple invoices for different projects and subcustomers can be paid at the same time. For more information, see Consolidated Payments.

You can use these preferences together or independently. What you choose to enable determines how your sales transactions and payments are handled.

Consolidate Projects on Sales Transactions only:

Projects are not available in the Project list when creating sales transactions.
A project column appears in the item list on sales transactions.

Consolidated Payments feature only:

Sales transactions can be created for projects.
Any balances for projects and subcustomers may be paid through the parent customer as well as through the subcustomer.

Both Consolidate Projects on Sales Transactions and Consolidated Payments:

Sales transactions can only be created for customers and subcustomers.
A project column appears in the item list on sales transactions.
Payments may be made through either the parent customer or the subcustomer.

Important:

Projects are not tracked as subcustomers when the Project Management feature is enabled. For more information, read Using Project Management.

You can enable the Consolidate Projects on Sales Transactions preference at Setup > Accounting > Preferences > Accounting Preferences . You can enable the Consolidated Payments feature at Setup > Company > Setup Tasks > Enable Features. You can enable the Consolidated Payments feature at Setup > Company > Setup Tasks > Enable Features on the Accounting subtab.

To accept a customer payment, go to Transactions > Customers > Accept Customer Payments.

Related Topics