NetSuite Project Accounting billing types

NetSuite Project Accounting, part of NetSuite ERP, allows organizations to maintain tight control over their projects to ensure they are completed on-time and on-budget. Through NetSuite’s Project Accounting functionality, project activities can be connected and integrated with company financials, which helps to ensure accurate accounting and billing throughout the project lifecycles. Project Accounting also combines job costing, project budgeting, and project billing. NetSuite has several different billing types that organizations can choose from to best suit their particular needs.

Fixed Bid Interval billing is the simplest of the billing types and is most similar to standard billing schedules outside of Project Accounting. With this billing type, you bill fixed amounts at designated time intervals. You determine the intervals at which you want to bill in the billing schedule.

Fixed Bid Interval billing is the simplest of the billing types and is most similar to standard billing schedules outside of Project Accounting. With this billing type, you bill fixed amounts at designated time intervals. You determine the intervals at which you want to bill in the billing schedule.

When the Sales Order is billed, the Invoice will be generated reflecting the 25% of work completed.

Fixed Bid Milestone billing allows organizations to bill based upon completion of project tasks, or milestones. The advantage of using this billing type is that billing will only occur when actual project work has been done. The milestones are configured in the work breakdown structure of the project when it is set up.

Time will be entered against the project and once a milestone is completed, a Sales Order will be ready to bill that only includes amounts related to that particular milestone.

Time and Materials billing is based on hours logged and approved against a project. Similarly to Fixed Bid Interval, time intervals are set up for when an organization wants to bill. However, there is no fixed price set for the project and for each interval, the hours logged and approved against the project are what is billed to the customer, even if it is more than the estimated hours.

Charge-based billing is a new billing type that was introduced to NetSuite in 2019. It lets you choose different billing methods for different project activities by creating charge rules. This offers organizations significant flexibility when it comes to how they bill and recognize revenue.

Charge rules define how the project will be billed and include:

• Fixed Fee: charges are created on fixed dates, when milestones are reached, or on project progress
• Time-Based: charges are created based on time entries from employees or vendors
• Expense-Based: charges are created based on expense reports from employees
• Purchase: charges are created based on purchase transactions for non-inventory and service items associated with the project

If your organization uses project billing, Rand Group will evaluate your billing processes then make improvements and efficiencies using the full breadth of NetSuite Project Accounting capabilities. Rand Group is an experienced NetSuite Alliance Partner with over 20 years of experience helping clients achieve business success using technology. Contact one of our NetSuite experts today to get started.