We have created a new form of billing called “recurring billing” which works similar to fixed price or quantity/output based billing but bills the same quantity each billing cycle. With iBE.net’s fixed price or output based billing you edit the actual quantity on the task and this quantity, minus any previously billed task deliverables, is billed each cycle at the unit price for that task’s service. For example if you are delivering web-pages at $50/page then in the first billing cycle or month you might enter and bill for an actual quantity of 20 pages ($1,000) and in the second month you might deliver another 25 pages to the same client. Increasing the task quantity to 45 causes the total quantity minus previously billed (the extra 25 pages) to be billed in the second cycle ($1,250).

With recurring billing you define a recurring billing interval on the task’s product or service master, normally your actual billing cycle for that client, and the task’s actual quantity is billed again and again each cycle irrespective of what was previously billed. So in the above example if you delivered another 20 pages in the second cycle you would not have to change anything, the client would be automatically charged for another $1,000. If you delivered 25 pages then you would increase the quantity from 20 to 25 rather than from 20 to 45.

It is important to use recurring billing correctly, being consistent between how you update task delivered quantities and the recurring billing intervals defined on the task’s product or service. Use recurring billing for fixed monthly (or other cyclical) payments such as a services contract for monthly flat fee. Also be aware that if you go back and rebill for a historical cycle it won’t charge the client again for a billing cycle on or prior to one you already billed. Instead of keeping track of the billed quantity, recurring billing keeps track of the date up to which a recurring task was billed, and new invoices cannot be created for that task prior to the date of the last invoice for the same task. Finally if the billing from/to dates do not correspond to exactly one billing cycle (they normally should) then the system will estimate how many complete or partial cycles fall between the invoice from/to dates and multiply up the quantity accordingly. For example if the task’s service master has a recurring billing interval of “week” and you create an invoice from Jan 1st-31st 2015, then five cycles or five times the task’s quantity would be billed.

We extended the range of possible invoice summarization options including summarization by department. For time and materials based contracts this summarization is based on the department of the employee who recorded their time or expense, and for fixed, recurring or quantity based contacts or deliverables this is based on the project’s department.

We also fixed a bug in the billing method and pricing sheet set-up screens whereby you could not earlier open these setting screens without first refreshing the browser. Finally we fixed a bug in the deletion of fixed price invoices which was not reducing the previously billed quantity in the task on deletion of the invoice to allow the task’s quantity to billed over again. Now when you delete a fixed or quantity/output based invoice the task can be billed again for the deleted invoice quantity (for non-recurring) and from the start date of the deleted invoice (for recurring services).

Finally we added more filter options to the billing summary: by customer, by project or by project leader – so that if more than one person in your company creates real or pro-forma invoices you can now sort and filter the billing summary project list according to each user’s scope of responsibility. For example project managers can create proforma invoices for their own projects by putting in their own name as the project leader. We also have a major client using project workflow to release projects for billing from the department to the central billing team. We added the project status as a column that can add to the billing summary, showing the project status and allowing you to edit this status from the billing summary without jumping back to the project management app. This saves users a lot of time if they wish to for example create a proforma invoice and release the project immediately to billing. Project workflow can also be used by any client wishing to keep track of project life-cycle status or progress both in project execution and billing.