Time and Material Billing: General Information

With time and material billing in MYOB Acumatica, you run project billing to automatically generate customer invoices based on the cost project transactions.

Learning Objectives

In this chapter, you will learn how to do the following:

  • Run project billing for a project
  • Process the documents that have been generated during the project billing
  • Review how the project’s actual amounts are updated with the billed amounts

Applicable Scenarios

You run project billing to prepare an invoice for the customer. You can bill the customer for the time and material spent on the project. The timing of project billing depends on the project billing period defined for the project.

The Time and Material Billing Process

The time and material billing workflow is provided for project tasks that need to be billed based on project transactions. Time and material billing can be performed only for project tasks of a project that is pending billing—that is, if the project has at least one unbilled transaction that is ready to be billed on the invoice date. The Time and Material billing steps can be run once the project transactions that match the selection criteria have been processed. Optionally, the allocation process can be executed for these transactions before billing.

To bill a project task for time and material, you need to create a billing rule on the Billing Rules (PM207000) form and configure a step or multiple steps of the Time and Material type in this rule. Multiple Time and Material steps are used in a billing rule for different account groups of transactions that should be used to determine the invoiced amounts by using different formulas. You assign the configured billing rule to project tasks on the Tasks tab of the Projects (PM301000) form.

When you run the project billing by clicking the Run Project Billing button on the form toolbar of the Projects form, the system prepares a pro forma invoice or an accounts receivable invoice, depending on the project workflow, which is defined by the state of the Create Pro Forma Invoice on Billing check box on the Summary tab of the Projects form.

The system creates an invoice based on the unbilled project transactions with amounts calculated by using the billing rules of the project tasks. In the billing, the system includes the transactions with a date that is earlier than the billing date and does not include the transactions with a date that is later than the billing date. If a project task is billed with a billing rule that includes only Time and Material billing steps, during the billing process, the system ignores any pending invoice amount of the revenue budget lines.

The transactions with the same date as the invoice date are billed if Include Trans. created on billing date is selected as the Billing Cut-off Date on the Projects Preferences (PM101000) form; if Exclude Trans. created on billing date is selected, the system skips the transactions with the same date as the invoice date.

During the billing process, the system groups the billable amounts into separate invoices based on the following:
  • The invoice group of the steps of the billing rules to which the project tasks refer
  • The customer
  • The customer location
  • The Bill Separately setting of each project task defined on the Project Tasks (PM302000) form

If the project billing is performed by using the pro forma invoice workflow, the invoice lines that are produced by the Time and Material billing steps are displayed on the Time and Material tab of the Pro Forma Invoices (PM307000) form. If the status of a pro forma invoice is On Hold, you can change the Amount to Invoice values in the time and material lines of the pro forma invoice.

When you release a pro forma invoice and the system creates the corresponding accounts receivable invoice, the system copies the values in the Amount to Invoice column from the Time and Material tab of the Pro Forma Invoices form to the lines of the accounts receivable invoice on the Details tab of the Invoices and Memos (AR301000) form.