The Billing & Invoicing module provides a streamlined solution for pricing goods and services to generate an invoice. It’s a powerful tool for processing customer purchase orders, create both bill orders and sale orders, as well as generating invoices from those orders. The Bill Order form allows importing services performed on the customer UUTs, pricing them as well as adding other types of fees and charges. The Sale Order’s integration with the Inventory system allows quickly adding sales products from both inventory or to be ordered to vendors and services, bill them with the agreed prices, and fulfill them. Additionally, it provides various other features such as: creating Credit Memos, tracking and managing customer PO balances, sending emails with invoices, and integration with other financial systems or software (such as QuickBooks, Contpaq, and even PACs for generating CFDIs in Mexico).

Workflow

The creation of a Bill order or a Sale order is the first step in generating an Invoice. Once the order is created and approved, the system can generate an Invoice based on the information entered in the order. This invoice can then be sent to the customer for payment. Additionally, a Credit Memo implies selecting the Invoice to be accredited, and entering the reason and description and amount to be accredited.

A Bill order is a document that represents a request for payment from a vendor for goods or services that have been received but not yet paid for. It’s typically generated after receiving a Customer PO, but in some instances is sent to the customer for review before the PO or before Invoicing for its approval. The system is flexible enough to accommodate to different workflows. For instance, it can automatically create a bill order when UUTs are received for calibration; in other instances, it allows importing calibration services after being serviced or in the process of being service. At any rate, the tool allows billing services and retrieving the prices agreed with the customer in the most recent quote (where available) or modify them in accordance with the customer purchase order. The bill order may include details of the services provided, pricing, and other relevant information required for billing.

On the other hand, a Sale order is used to initiate the sales process where a customer places a purchase order for distribution products from the inventory (or to be ordered and fulfilled later). In any case, once the bill order or sale order is fulfilled (that is, when products are taken out of the inventory and assigned to the sale order item and each service is completed), and the orders reflect the customer PO or agreement (currency, payment method, prices, service types, etc.), it is now sent to invoice.

The invoicing phase is flexible enough to accommodate to different locations and scenarios. For instance, it can be configured to automatically be exported to an accounting software like QuickBooks. In this scenario, the generated invoice, within Invoice, will go thru its usual workflow from that other software going forward. In other typical scenario the invoice is generated within the system, but then linked to an accounting software (Contpaq) generating a diary policy of all the invoices of the previous day. It can even connect to a PAC (Authorized Certification Provider), a company authorized by the government to generate and sign electronic invoices, such as the CFDI, which is the digital tax receipt used in Mexico.

The module includes a Kanban to quickly follow-up Billings thru each stage, a dashboard to check customer purchase orders with their balances, and quickly visualize the whole fulfillment process (It may show related Quote, Sale Order/Bill Order, customer PO, Purchase, Invoice).

Within the billing, there are the option to transfer items from one order to another; the billed serviced items may be configured to follow a custom template (e.g. it would show the model, ID and serial serviced in the description of the invoiced item), or the use of generic fees description to match exactly the customer PO items, if required.