Billing for Flat Fee Arrangements

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Fee Arrangements Settings

Accounting and Allocations for Flat Fee Arrangements

Project and Subscription Fee Arrangements bill differently than Hourly Arrangements. The biggest difference is that you can generate a bill before any work is done on it. This article is focused on how these differences affect generating and managing bills.

Generating Bills

The Billing Date Range does not affect whether Project and Subscription Matters show. By Default, Project and Subscription Matters are excluded from the Generate Bills page. There are new options when editing the filter on the Generate Bills page to include Project and/or Subscription Matters.

• Exclude Hourly Matters: This will exclude any matter whose active fee arrangement is hourly. Useful for looking at only your project and subscription matters.
• Included Project Matters: Includes Project Matters that have a remaining balance for the fee arrangement.
• Include Subscription Matters: Includes Subscription Matters whose next bill date is within the “Limit to Next Bill within” setting.
• Limited to Next Bill within: The Next Bill date for Subscription Matters is the last bill date plus the billing period of the arrangement.

When generating multiple Bills at once, both Project and Subscription Matters will generate their Bills in ways different from Hourly.

• Project Matters will generate a Bill with the specified Issue Date for the amount remaining for the Project, divided by the remaining number of Bills for the Project.
• Subscription Matters will generate a Bill for the arrangement’s ‘Amount To Bill’ amount, as well as set the Issue Date to the beginning of the Next Billing Period (If no previous Bills, it will use the ‘Initial Billing Date’, if that is blank the bill will use the ‘Effective Date’)

When generating a single Project Bill, the user can specify the amount to charge for the Flat Fee Amount. This amount cannot be more than the remaining amount for the Project (shown on the dialog). 

Pre-Bills

Project and Subscription Bills will always have one line item for the flat fee being charged. This Line Item can be edited to change the rate and the description but it cannot be deleted. Changes to this won’t affect the Fee Arrangement itself, just that specific Bill.

Project and Subscription Bills cannot have Time Entries, they are not added when the bill is generated, existing time entries cannot be added to the bill, and new time entry line items cannot be added.

Expense Entries can still be put on Flat Fee Bills. Existing expenses will still be added when generating a bill, existing expenses can be added to the pre-bill like normal, and new expenses can be added as line items while editing the pre-bill.

Navigation Paths:

Generated Bills Filter: Billing > Generate Bills > Pencil Icon next to Generate Bills Filter on the top left