Billing Event Items, Billing Events and Billing Event Batches

FinancialForce PSA tracks actualsTotals for a given time period. at the regionA level of hierarchy used in PSA to which other objects belong such as resources, opportunities and projects., practiceA level of hierarchy used in PSA to which other objects belong such as resources, opportunities and projects., groupA level of hierarchy used in PSA to which other objects belong such as resources, opportunities and projects., resourceA contact that works on a project. and projectA collection of activities and related items to be managed over a defined time range, such as timecards, expenses, milestones and budgets. level, prior to billing. In FinancialForce PSA you can gather billing data, batch it, and make it available for release to your invoicing system. Several items are used to do this, which are described in the sections that follow.

Note:

The Project object contains fields to indicate whether a project has a business recordTimecard Split, Expense, Milestone, Miscellaneous Adjustment or Budget that is ready for billing event generation. See Project Fields.

Billing Event Items

A billing event item is a simplified, potentially summarized data item for a billable record or records. Typically, a billing event item will have a one-to-one relationship with an individual timecard splitA whole timecard or part of a timecard., expenseA record of expenses incurred by resources assigned to a project or opportunity., milestoneA fixed target, which when achieved, can be billed to the customer for a fixed fee or by logging time against it., or miscellaneous adjustmentA catch-all business record that allows you to correct data entry errors or adjust transactions. that is being billed, specific to a project.

Some business records can be billed and invoiced even when their project is inactive.

If you have the permissions to do so, you can create a detailed description for your billing event items. See Customizing Billing Event Items.

Billing Events

A billing event is a structure used for the collection of billing event items. Depending on your org's configuration, a billing event can contain different types of billing event items, such as for milestones, expenses, and timecards, or can contain only one type of billing event item, such as timecards. For more information on configuration, see the separateBudgets, separateExpenses, separateExpensesByTypes, separateMilestones, separateMiscellaneousAdjustments, and separateTimecards fields described in Billing Settings.

For example, you can have your system configured to separate expenses and milestones. This creates a billing event for billing event items from expenses, a billing event for billing event items from milestones, and a billing event containing billing event items from timecards budgets and miscellaneous adjustments.

In billing events, you can:

• Stop initial generation of a billing event for items that are not approved. For further information, see the approvalsEnabled setting in Billing Settings.
• Exclude a business transactionA transaction associated with a Timecard Split record, Expense, Milestone, Miscellaneous Adjustment or Budget. from generating billing events using the Billing Hold checkbox. See Budget Fields for an example.
• Manually generate billing events for a region, accountAccounts in the context of FinancialForce PSA are the same as accounts in Salesforce. Users can create and view certain FinancialForce PSA data related to the account on the related lists. or project.
• Schedule billing for a region, account or project to occur at specific time periods.
• Process billing events from their detail pages using the Release and Invoice buttons. If the Billing Events Integration is enabled on your org, use the Create Billing Document button (instead of the Invoice button) to create draft billing documents for your billing events. See Creating Billing Documents for Billing Events for more information.
• Schedule generation of Billing Events by creating a Salesforce scheduled job.

If your administrator has configured PSA to display the Practice and Group drop-down lists on the Generate Billing Events section of the Billing Events page, you can further filter on the selected unit type by practice and/or group. When you select a practice or group, only projects that are in the selected dimensions are processed.

Billing Event Batches

A billing event batch represents a set of billing events, grouped by account and project and released as a group for invoicing. Billing event batches can be generated from the RPGAbbreviation of region, practice, group. level and then released for invoicing either at the batch or billing event level. Bulk generation, release, or removal is done through the Billing Event Generation tab.

Your administrator can configure PSA to group billing events by project ID or master project ID.

PSA can append to unreleased billing event batches depending on the configuration that your administrator has set in the Billing configuration groupA collection of configuration options contained in the configuration groups tab that defines behavior of a FinancialForce PSA object or feature..

Billing Eligibility and Business Records

For an item to be eligible for billing, the following applies:

• Project Account — A project account must be selected.
• Project Exclude from Billing — must be deselected.
• Business record Billing Hold — must be deselected.
• Business record Include In Financials — must be selected.
• Business record Billable — must be selected on Timecard Splits, Expenses, Budgets, Milestones and Miscellaneous Adjustments.
• Business record Billed — must be deselected.
• Business record Invoiced — must be deselected.
• Business record — must NOT have an existing Billing Event Item lookup value.
• If your administrator has set the PSA approvalsEnabled configuration option in the Billing Group is set to true, the business record Approved for Billing checkbox must be selected.
• On Miscellaneous Adjustments, the Transaction Category field must match one of the transaction categories in the PSA miscellaneousAdjustmentCategories option in the Billing configuration groupA collection of configuration options contained in the configuration groups tab that defines behavior of a FinancialForce PSA object or feature..

Business records reflecting Billing Event flags and status. These fields help provide linkages between the business records and their related Billing Events for research, integration and troubleshooting.

Billing Event Calculations

Every time you generate billing for a time period, an associated Billing Event Calculation is created to include all the related Billing Event Batches, Billing Events, and Billing Event Items.

Your administrator can add the Billing Event Calculation field to your Billing Event Batch, Billing Event, and Billing Event Item pages to show the related Billing Event Calculation.

Your administrator can also include a Billing Event Calculation related list on your region, practice, group, and project page layouts to show related calculations.

Filtering

On the Billing Event Generation tab you can choose to generate billing events for a region, account, period and project. You can generate billing events for more than one project where they belong to the same practice and group. You can also opt to include time periods in billing event generation prior to the one selected in the Period field.

After generating billing events, you can:

• Filter batches by region, practice, or group (depending on the configuration your administrator has set in the unitType setting of the Billing configuration groupA collection of configuration options contained in the configuration groups tab that defines behavior of a FinancialForce PSA object or feature.), account, time periodA period of time with a start date and an end date to which forecasts, actuals calculations, billing event batches, utilization calculations and region plans belong., category, and pre-bill status.
• Sort batches by batch name, account, time period, total amount and created date.

Clearing Billing Data and Removing Billing Events

Warning:

Never delete billing event batches and billing events using native pages. Remove billing events using the Billing Event Generation tab or the Clear Billing Data button on the Billing Event Batch and Billing Event Detail pages.

If you process business records through the entire billing cycle from creation to billing event release and invoicing, and then realize you need to undo the process and clear the billing data, you can do so and ensure that affected records are properly updated. When you clear billing data, the selected record and its associated records are rolled back to a state where the business record is no longer billed or invoiced. You can clear billing data on the detail pages for: Billing event items, billing events, budgets, expense reports, expenses milestones, miscellaneous adjustments, timecard splits and timecards.

When you clear the billing data for a billing event item or its associated business recordTimecard Split, Expense, Milestone, Miscellaneous Adjustment or Budget, the associated billing event item is deleted and its associated business record is marked as not billed or invoiced. Billing and invoicing information on the business record is cleared.

When you clear billing data for a billing event this also clears billing data for each of its child billing event items.

When you clear billing data at a parent business recordTimecard Split, Expense, Milestone, Miscellaneous Adjustment or Budget, the billing data for all of the child business records is also cleared.

Note:

You cannot remove a billing event batch if any of its child billing events is released. Additionally, you cannot delete billing events and billing event items when they are released or invoiced. Use the Clear Billing Data option instead.