Introduction

The Billing of Services requires flexibility to cater for the variety of service types that companies usually provide. These can range from ad hoc one off billings to regular fixed billings e.g. monthly or quarterly to ongoing service contract arrangements.

One of the critical areas of concern with services billings is to ensure that all services provided are in fact billed and that the invoices are issued on a timely basis. For ad-hoc work, this is best achieved by capturing each potential piece of work at the quote stage, then using workflow, track the job through to final billing. For regular or recurring billings these can be set up so that they automatically create invoices at the required frequency, ensuring none are forgotten or missed.

What does it do?

Century offers a number of different options for the creation of Billing Invoices. These are all able to be fully integrated with the Century Accounts receivable, General ledger, Project costing, and Job costing modules.

Invoice formats are user definable and can print on plain paper, on preprinted invoice paper, on letterheads or to PDF, which can then be emailed. When printing to PDF your company Logo etc can be incorporated in colour as part of the invoice format.

Ad hoc billing invoices can be created by entering free form text. Alternatively, ad-hoc services can be captured at the time of issuing a quote. The quote is entered into Century and a written quote printed to issue to clients. As for invoices, quote formats are user definable and can be printed on plain paper, on preprinted quote paper, on letterheads or to PDF, which can then be emailed.

All quotes in the system marked as sent can be monitored for regularly follow up until either cancelled or accepted. Once the quote is accepted by the client, workflow requires the following steps to occur, entry of a purchase order reference, the tasking of the job, the delivery of the service and finally the full or partial billing of the service. At any point, the status of each job can be monitored to ensure all jobs are being tasked and billed in a timely manner.

Service contracts cater for regular billings e.g. monthly, quarterly or annual where there is a fixed price for a variety of different service items that are user defined. Once set up the system will generate a billing invoice at each renewal date and automatically reset the renewal date to the next month, quarter, year as required.

As service contracts are often billed in advance e.g. a 12 month maintenance contract for a photocopier Century can be set up to defer the initial billing income as a prepaid revenue item and to automatically amortise his to income over the period of the contract.