Advanced Billing Overview

Advanced billing enables you to create billing schedules to invoice sales over a range of time or a contract term. For example, a service company can use advanced billing to manage recurring billing on sales such as a one-year membership billed monthly.

Billing schedules manage the billing process to track when to invoice customers and how much to bill.

When a billing schedule is assigned on a sale, NetSuite adds a bill to the billing queue at the intervals determined by the schedule. Then, you can go to Transactions > Sales > Bill Sales Orders to create the invoices in the billing queue.

The initial bill for each schedule is created on the date entered in the Start Date field of the order. If no start date is entered, the first invoice is created when the order is fulfilled or partially fulfilled.

For example, you can apply a billing schedule that defines the initial billing amount at 50% of the sale total with a recurrence frequency of monthly and a recurrence count of two. If the sales order totals $1,000.00 and the Start date is January 15th, the sales order will be billed as below:

Initial invoice for 50% of the sale =$500.00 billed on January 15th

The balance of the amount due is automatically split evenly between remaining bills.
Second invoice for 25% of the sale =$250.00 billed on February 15th
Third invoice for 25% of the sale =$250.00 billed on March 15th

When you view a sales order, you can click the Schedule link at the top of the page to open the schedule record.

For orders that have billings outstanding, you can create the remaining bills manually before NetSuite creates them from the billing schedule. You can create the next bill on the billing schedule, or you can bill all of the remaining unbilled portion of the order.

You can set a preference to Invoice in Advance of Fulfillment:

Enable the preference to invoice your customers for the full amount prior to the complete fulfillment of an order. With this preference, you can invoice your customers in advance for an entire order that is shipped in parts.
Disable the preference to limit the quantity fulfilled to the quantity remaining on the fulfillment.

Set the preference at Setup > Accounting > Preferences > Accounting Preferences > Order Management > Invoicing. For more information, read Accounting Preferences and Billing Orders Using Advanced Shipping with Advanced Billing.

The Advanced Billing feature requires that you also enable the Sales Orders feature.

Billing schedules can also be used with the Project Management feature. For details, read Project Billing.

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