Billing Plans

User Manuals | Billing | Billing Plans

Billing Plans are live billing templates, that can be assigned to Contracts and affect their billing aspects from a centralized place, saving you time and leaving much less room for errors.

You can create your own Billing Plans or pick predefined ones, to streamline Contract management and customer billing.

Billing Plans allow you to easily manage common contract types: MSP agreements, Software subscriptions, ‘All-you-can-eat’ arrangements, Help desk services, and more.

Usage example:

To better understand how the billing plans can be effectively used, see the following example:

Plan Sample: Billing Plan that covers only phone and remote support. It does not cover on-site work, nor any expenses or parts.

Customers under such a plan pay an agreed amount on a monthly basis and are billed for other not-covered services as follows:

• $100/hour for onsite support
• $15 travel fees

Defining your plan:

1. Create a Global Plan (see Billing Plan Types)
2. Plan Settings:
   1. Allow Labor Items.
   2. Do not allow Parts and Expense Items to be used.
   3. Set the contract’s Billable flag behavior for Labor Items to – Billable.
   4. Add two Labor Item exceptions for ‘Phone Support’ and ‘Remote Support’ and set their Billable flag to ‘Not Billable’ (i.e. covered).
      This way, parts and expense Items cannot be logged as Charges under the Contracts assigned to this Plan. The phone/remote support services will be covered while any other type of labor charges will be billed
      
      
      
3. Custom Pricing Example:
   Setting the Custom Pricing for the Plan is optional. By default the prices will be taken from the account settings.
   For cases where the services/products should be charged with specific prices, you can set the custom prices as explained in Setting up Custom Pricing article.
   For example, you can set the following rates:
   
   
   
   
4. Contract Price Structure:
   Select an item that represent the common price structure for Contracts added under this plan.
   
   
5. Creating a Contract by this Plan:
   
   Click New button in the Contracts window, select the ‘Phone and Remote Support Plan‘
   
   
   
   OR
   
   Go to Affected Contracts under the Plan and click New:
   
   
   

Billing Plan Types

The Billing Plan Type is set when you create a new Plan. It cannot be modified later.

Available billing plan types are:

• Global - A Contract that is assigned with a Global Plan allows the use of an unlimited number of Charges of any type. The only limitation for Global Contracts is the contract end date. A typical usage for this type would be a phone service contract which is valid for one year.

• Block of Time - A Contract that is assigned with the Block of Time Plan is suitable for a limited and predefined block of service time agreements. Each Charge added to this Contract will decrease the time remaining for this Account.

• Block of Money - A Contract assigned with the Block of Money Plan is suitable for a limited and predefined sum of Money agreements or for "all-included" service agreements. Each Charge added to this Contract will be deducted from the original sum of money.

• Block of Tickets - A Contract assigned with the Block of Tickets Plan is suitable for a limited and predefined block of service Tickets agreements. Each Ticket added to this Contract will subtract one Ticket from the original block of Tickets.

Plan Settings

Billing Plan settings include the option to choose which types of services and products will be covered by the contract. The plan affects all relevant Contracts automatically.

Billing Plan Settings include:

• Item Group permissions

The Item Group settings allow you to choose which type of Items can or cannot be used for Charges added to Contracts assigned with this Plan. The settings include whether Labor, Expense or Part Item groups are allowed. Exceptions for specific Items can be added.

• Billable Flag Settings (relevant for Plans of Global type)

When defining Global plans, you can set default values for the Billable flag, based on the Item group. This way you can choose which items are covered by the contract, and which are not covered, thus should be billed. Note that for other Plan types (i.e. block plans), the billable flag is determined automatically by the system according to the block type.

Plan Custom Pricing

A Plan can optionally have custom pricing settings, which override the system settings. In cases where the plan custom pricing is not set, the relevant customer’s custom pricing applies.

Custom Pricing lets you set special pricing for the Plan. Once you define custom prices for a Plan, these prices will be used automatically for every charge logged for Contracts assigned to this Plan. You can also manually adjust the prices while creating a charge.

You can read more about this under Custom Pricing.

Plan Contract Price Structure

The Contract Price Structure lets you define items that reflect the price the contract. This is commonly used with recurring Contracts. When assigning new Contracts to this plan, these items will be displayed and can be easily added as Contract-Price Charges thus reflecting the contract’s total price. Such Charges are automatically added when Contracts are renewed for the next period.

Default Values for New Contracts

You can optionally define default values to some fields in the plan. These default values will be used to initialize the contract’s fields, once a contract is created and assigned to this plan.