Recurring Billing

Term Definition
Recurring billing is billing that occurs at specified intervals. An example of recurring billing is payroll for salaried employees or monthly retainers.

Professional service firms such as legal, high tech consulting, and accounting provide a scope of services that typically goes beyond providing the service for a fee. Clients of professional service organizations require a variety of non-standard billing structures such as pro-rating, split billing, cost plus billing and milestone billing. These billing structures also create a multitude of accountability requirements. Organizations require an effective way to tailor the billing to client and project needs, which also provides a clearer view of the organization's financial standing. The ability to manage complex billing processes such as proration, split billing is facilitated with automation. Time and billing systems  cannot only improve billing efficiency but improve auditability.

Time and billing systems allow organizations to easily navigate multiple billing options. For example, a time and billing system would enable you to set a project recurring billing rule to bill your client a fixed amount at pre-defined intervals. The project recurring billing rule consists of various billing intervals. Each billing interval has a fixed rate, billing date, and a state. When a billing interval reaches its billing date, the state of the billing interval is set to Com­plete, and a billable money charge entry would then be created in the application. This money charge entry can then be included in an invoice or multi-client invoice.

This type of rule would be useful to bill a client for work done on a project without having users create time entries. For example, if you have a monthly flat rate you are charging your client for work on a specific project or for support, you can set up a recurring billing rule to bill the client a certain amount every month without having to enter any time entries and go through the invoicing.

Related Terms
Time and Billing

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