Understanding Charge Rules

Charge rules determine the billing rate, the timing of charges, and the stage of a charge when it's generated. Charge rules can be either fixed fee, time-based, expense-based, or purchase.

A breakdown of individual charge rule types and respective project activities or inputs is listed below:

Note:

If you use the Override Rates on Time Records accounting preference, time-based rules will override any rate changes made on time transactions.

Tiered Charge Rules

You can define multiple charge rules for a single project to create complex billing criteria based on a variety of factors. For example, you might want to bill a project based on time and materials. You would create two charge rules: one fixed date rule for the up-front billable amount for materials and one time-based rule that creates charges for time entered.

If you create time-based or expense-based charge rules, they’re applied in the order you set whenever time or expenses are entered. You can filter rules so they only apply to certain time or expenses. For example, you might want a rule to only apply to time or expenses entered for a specific item.

You can also use caps with time-based charge rules for additional flexibility. For more information, see Using Caps with Charge Rules.

Charges Creation

Each customer has a set amount of computing bandwidth for calculations and processes like charge creation. There are 2–50 computing threads (depending on your license) that process charge requests in parallel. One project can’t recalculate both actual and forecast charges for the same rule type at the same time, but different rule types can run in parallel. Projects ready for recalculation are sent to a work queue. If a project is already in the queue, it won’t be added again.

Forecast and Actual Charges Creation and Recreation

Both forecast and actual charges get recalculated when a certain trigger is hit, either from the user or the system side:

Related Topics

General Notices