Billing Costs to Customers

NetSuite enables you to bill costs back to customers for time, items, and expenses you incur while working on a project for them. For example, a locksmith can bill costs to customers in the following ways:

• Bill Items to Customers – Bill a customer for a safe that was ordered.

• Bill Time to Customers – Bill a customer for the time an employee spent installing a safe.

• Bill Expenses to Customers – Bill a customer for subcontractor fees incurred to install a safe in another state.

To bill costs to customers, you first need to enable the feature. An administrator can go to Setup > Company > Enable Features. On the Transactions subtab, check the Bill Costs To Customers box, and then click Save.

Bill your costs to customers in one of the following ways:

• Enter the time, item or expense, and mark it as billable.

  When you enter time transactions, purchase orders, bills, checks or credit card payments for time, an item or expense, you can check the Billable box and assign a customer to be billed for the item or expense. Then, when you bill the customer, the expense appears on a Billable subtab of the invoice or cash sale.

  Important:

  The Billable box has the following behavior:

  • Billable field is disabled if project without customer is selected.

  • Billable field is disabled if non-billable project task is selected.

  • If project without billing type is selected then default value depends on accounting preference EXPENSES BILLABLE BY DEFAULT

  • If project with billing type T&M or CB is selected then default value =T (it doesn't matter which value has accounting preference EXPENSES BILLABLE BY DEFAULT)

  • If project with billing type FBI or FBM is selected then default value =F (it doesn't matter which value has accounting preference EXPENSES BILLABLE BY DEFAULT)

  Note:

  If you enter the billable item on a purchase order, you must bill the purchase order before you can bill the customer for the item.

• Create an invoice or cash sale to bill the customer for the cost you entered.

  When you create a customer invoice or cash sale, the costs you have billed to customers show on the Billable Items, Billable Expenses and Billable Time subtabs. After you select the customer on the bill, click the appropriate subtab, and check the line items you want to bill the customer for.

  Click Mark All or Unmark All to check or clear all items, expenses or time that show on the subtab.

  For more information, read Creating an Invoice or Cash Sales.

The items and expenses appear as normal line items on the transaction. The customer sees only a selling price that includes the markup spread over the expense items. However, you will see the markup as a separate entry when you view the invoice or cash sale in NetSuite.

Preferences for Billing Costs

When you use the Bill Costs to Customers feature, set a preference for invoices to include memos you enter on time and expense records. To set this preference, go to Setup > Accounting > Preferences > Accounting Preferences > Time & Expenses. Check the Copy Time Memos to Invoices and Copy Expense Memos to Invoices boxes and then click Save.

If you want to classify billable costs by class or department, you must enable the Allow Per-Line Departments and Allow Per-Line Classes preferences at Setup > Accounting > Preferences > Accounting Preferences > General under Classifications.

To save time, you can create invoices in bulk for billable expenses, time, and items. For more information, read Invoicing Billable Customers.

Tracking Class, Department, and Location for Billable Costs

If you track class and department on the line-item level, when you invoice a customer for billable costs, the classifications (class, department, and location) from the bill are maintained on the billable subtabs of the invoice regardless of the classifications set in the header of the invoice.

You can modify the classifications on the billable subtabs of the invoice.

General Notices