Billing Schedules

A billing schedule defines the schedule to bill a sale over a range of time or a contract term. For example, you may want to bill monthly for the sale of a one-year membership, or bill quarterly for a three-year service contract. Billing schedules manage the billing process by tracking when to invoice customers and how much to bill.

For example, you can create a billing schedule that defines the initial billing amount at 50% of the sale total with a recurrence frequency of monthly and a recurrence count of two. If you apply this billing schedule to a service contract sales order that totals $1,000.00, the sales order will be billed as below:

Initial invoice for 50% of the sale = $500.00

The balance of the amount due is automatically split evenly between remaining bills.
Second invoice one month later for 25% of the sale = $250.00
Third invoice one month after the second for 25% of the sale = $250.00

You can set up billing schedules to accommodate many types of sales. For example, some sales may require a set currency amount for the initial payment, while others require a percentage of the total. Sales may require weekly, monthly or quarterly recurrent invoices. You can set billing to recur monthly 12 times or quarterly 3 times, or even customize bill recurrence schedules to suit your needs.

When a billing schedule is created, you apply it to an entire sales order or select a different billing schedule for each line item on an order. You can also assign a default billing schedule to an item record so it automatically shows on a sales order when that item is selected.

You can also create a new billing schedule from an estimate or sales order. A billing schedule created from an estimate or sales order can be identified as Public or Private. Private billing schedules show in the list of billing schedules only on the transaction it is created from. Note that milestone billing schedules cannot be marked Public. If you manually click Next Bill to bill a sales order and there are any remaining lines that were part of the previous billing schedule, but not billed, NetSuite bills those remaining lines on the next billing date. Click Next Bill again to move forward to the next billing date on the billing schedule. To remove a line from a billing schedule, close the line on the sales order. If you delete the line, your billing schedule amounts could be different from expected.

When using a billing schedule, NetSuite expects fulfillable items to be fulfilled and completely billed on the first invoice before progressing to the next billing schedule invoice. If an item on an invoice is not fulfilled and not fully billed, the billing schedule does not advance to the next invoice.

When you view an estimate or sales order, you can click the Schedule link at the top of the page to open the schedule record. On a sales order, you can click the Schedule subtab to view the billing schedule for the order.

Note:

Editing a billing schedule that is already associated with an open sales order does not update existing instances of the billing schedule for the open order. To update existing instances, go to Transactions > Sales > Enter Sales Orders > List to open the sales order and re-save it. Upon saving, the billing schedules are updated with your changes.

Billing schedules affect your sales forecast report by dividing revenue across the billing schedule period. A sales order with a billing schedule is calculated into forecast schedules based on the initial and subsequent billing amounts and on the billing start date. Sales forecasts for a particular period include amounts set to be billed in that period.

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