Contracts & billing

Contracts & billing covers the customer-facing side of Project Financials — how you turn a won bid into a contract, structure it for billing, raise progress claims against it, and invoice your customer.

What this covers

A contract is a record on a project that represents the agreement with your customer. It holds the total contract value, the structure for how you'll bill against it, and the running history of every claim and variation raised. Once a contract is in place, you bill against it by raising claims — each claim covers one billing cycle (typically a month) and produces a NetSuite invoice when certified.

This area covers everything from setting up the billing structure through to issuing claims and processing variations.

Billing types

Project Financials supports several billing types. Pick the one that matches how the contract was written:

• Stage billing — payment at fixed milestones (e.g. 10% on deposit, 30% at slab, 40% at lock-up, 20% on completion). Each stage is a fixed percentage of the contract value.
• Progress billing — % complete billing against a Schedule of Values. The most common pattern for commercial construction, including AIA G702/G703 jurisdictions.
• Time & material (T&M) — bill at cost (or cost + markup) based on actual purchase orders, vendor bills and time entries posted to the project.
• Drawdown billing — for projects financed by a construction loan. Claims draw from a loan facility rather than billing the customer directly.
• Capital billing — for projects that capitalise cost as a fixed asset rather than recognising revenue.

Less-common variants — Internal, Inventory, T&M Cost Type — exist for specific scenarios. Most customers use one of the five above.

Contract structures

Two ways to structure what gets claimed:

• Billing Stages — used with Stage billing. A list of milestones with a percentage and date for each. Sum must equal 100%.
• Schedule of Values (SoV) — used with Progress billing. A list of billable line items, each with a value, that you progressively claim against by % complete per line. Can be auto-generated from the linked estimate (Default) or hand-written (Custom).

In this section

• Set up billing schedules — create a contract, choose a billing type, build the Schedule of Values or Billing Stages
• Issue a progress claim — claim against an active contract for a billing period
• Create a variation — raise a change order against an existing contract

Requires

• Project Financials installed and configured — see Install & configure
• An active project with at least one approved estimate — see Estimating