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Contract Billing

The Contract Billing extension provides easy-to-use contract management functionality to handle simple and complex contract billing scenarios. This extension is suitable for organisations that process recurring billing but do not require the more complex service management module available in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central (Business Central).

Features

The extension is compatible with both the Essentials and Premium editions and includes the following features:

  • Create one or more contracts per customer.
  • Add one or more lines to each contract.
  • Specify the customer and the bill-to-customer on each contract.
  • Specify payment terms and payment methods per contract.
  • Optionally specify SEPA Direct Debit mandates for contracts paid by direct debit.
  • Handle weekly, fortnightly, monthly, bi-monthly, quarterly, half-yearly, and yearly billing frequencies.
  • Handle different billing frequencies within the same contract (e.g., some lines get billed annually, but others get billed monthly).
  • Define a start and end date for contracts or create open-ended contracts.
  • Defer revenue for contracts that span multiple accounting periods. Optionally suppress the revenue deferral where the income should be recognised in the month it is billed.
  • Prevent accidental changes to contracts by locking contracts for editing.
  • Optionally implement workflows to approve new contracts or changes to contracts.
  • Maintain versions of contracts when changes are made with the ability to track differences between versions and audit trail easily.
  • Enable automatic contract billing through a job queue with an option to either create the invoices and post them or only create them.
  • Consolidate billing per customer in a single invoice, invoice per contract or invoice per line.
  • Optionally add extended texts to provide more information on an invoice.
  • Automatically raise purchase invoices for contracts with a back-to-back vendor agreement.
  • Optionally configure automatic price increases.
  • Handle back-dated changes to contracts which will credit any billing that has been done and replace it with a new invoice.
  • Place contracts on hold indefinitely or for a set period.
  • Maintains contract ledger entries that contain all billing history
  • Perform bulk imports from Excel to create new or update existing contracts using the Excel Importer. Note that the Excel Importer requires an additional subscription.

Why not use the standard Business Central service management module?

The Business Central Service Management module indeed caters to contract billing, which will handle recurring billing. Some of the reasons why you may not wish to use this module are:

  • The service contracts do not support as many billing frequencies
  • Service contracts can be set up against service items (e.g. computer hardware that a company sells and supports). As a result, there is a lot more complexity in the contracts, and if you do not have this type of business, then the added functionality is unnecessary.
  • The service management module is only available on a premium license. If you do not require the complete service management functionality, you may wish to consider other options.

When should you use service management?

You should consider using service management if your business is focused on providing ongoing service to customers and you have requirements such as:

  • Scheduling service calls and setting up service orders.
  • Tracking repair parts and supplies.
  • Assigning service personnel based on skill and availability.
  • Providing service estimates and service invoices.

You can find more information about the Service Management module here.