Using contracts to bill another organization

Contracts can also be used to bill one organization for work you do for another organization. For this, you can use a preexisting relationship between a parent organization and a sub-organization, or select any organization in your Autotask instance as the billing organization.

Billing the parent organization for work at the sub-organization

EXAMPLE  You have a customer with several customer locations in your area. You have set up each location as a separate organization in Autotask, because you need to keep track of contacts, devices and tickets for each customer location separately. But all invoices need to be sent to the corporate headquarters.

A parent-sub-organization relationship is a permanent relationship between two organizations that is set up at the organization level. To bill the parent organization, you must first establish the hierarchical parent / sub-organization relationship between two organizations in the Autotask CRM module. Refer to The Sub-Organizations tab.

When you select a contract for a project or ticket for a sub-organization, the contract selector displays both the sub-organization's contracts and the parent organization's contracts. Parent contracts are identified with a check mark in the Parent column. If you select a parent contract, work performed for the project or ticket is then billed to the parent organization. For details on the parent / sub-organization relationship and how the billing organization is determined, refer to Invoicing sub-organization items to a parent organization.

Using a third-party billing organization

EXAMPLE  Company A functions as a clearing house for service calls from multiple end clients. That organization establishes a billing relationship with the end client and then contracts out the work. When you accept work from Organization A, you will want to track the work you do for the end client organization, Organization B, in Autotask, but you need to bill Organization A, the organization that passed the work to you. You do not bill Organization B directly. In this case, you would set up a contract for the end client, specify Organization A as the Billing Organization, and then apply that contract to the tickets or tasks that you work on for Organization B.

A Billing Organization is a third-party organization selected in the contract to receive the invoices for all billing items that fall under the contract. Revenue and costs are tracked against the end client organization, but all approved and posted items for the contract will be invoiced to the billing organization.

Any organization in your Autotask instance can be selected. A parent/sub-organization relationship is not required, and the billing organization does not even have to be a customer. You can set up as many billing organizations for an end client as you can set up contracts.

NOTE  If Multi-currency is enabled, the billing organization must have the same currency as the end client.

How To...

  1. Enter both organizations into your Autotask instance, the organization for which you will do the work and the organization that you will bill. For information on working with organizations, refer to Overview of organizations.
  2. Set up a contract for the organization where you will be doing the work, and select the billing organization. If you want, you can select a contact from that organization as the Billing Organization Notification Contact. The Billing Organization Notification Contact can receive automatic notifications triggered by workflow rules. For information on selecting a billing organization, refer to Page 2: Revenue and billing.
  3. Apply the contract to projects, tickets, or time entries. After you post billable items from the projects, tickets, or time entries associated with the contract, the items will be added to invoices for the billing organization. Until they are posted, they are associated with the End Client organization. For information on applying contracts, refer to How contracts are applied.
  4. If the billing organization is a customer, enable Client Portal access for one or more contacts. The contacts can then view details from projects and tickets for which they will be billed. You enable the billing organization contacts as you would contacts for any Client Portal client. For information on setting up the Client Portal and enabling contacts, refer to ADMIN: Configuring the Client Portal.

EXAMPLE  Best Practice: We recommend that you make your billing organizations Customer type organizations and then give one or more of their contacts access to the Client Portal. In this way the organization that you are billing can view tickets and projects for which they are being billed.

Because the billing organization is not the End Client organization that appears on contracts, tickets, and projects, billing organization resources do not have access to ticket or project information. They cannot track the progress of a project, or view time entries or notes on tickets.

If the billing organization is a Customer type organization, you can provide Client Portal access to one or more contacts. Those contacts can then log into the portal to view ticket and project details, for example, project schedules and notes, and ticket descriptions, status, and notes.

In the portal, they refer to only tickets and projects associated with a contract for which they are the billing organization. In the ticket and project details, they refer to only details related to the items for which they will be billed; for example, if you enter a time entry on a ticket and select a different contract on the time entry, that time entry will not appear in the portal.

The end client information is displayed on separate End Client pages in the portal (End Client Tickets and End Client Projects). The pages are only available to organizations that have been selected as billing organization on one or more contracts. The information on the end client portal pages is read-only. Users cannot edit the information or add notes or contacts. In the End Client Projects Summary view, users can click a link to email project resources.

When you specify a billing organization, all labor and charges remain associated with the end client organization until the items have been approved and posted. The items are approved and posted, adjusted, or un-posted under the end client organization. They show up in Dashboard and Profitability views as revenue and cost items for the end client organization. In reports and LiveReports, the items appear under the end client organization.

Once the items are approved and posted, they appear under the billing organization on the Invoicing / Items to Invoice page. They are then included on invoices generated for the billing organization.

NOTE   On the Invoicing / Items to Invoice page, the Show Sub-Organization Items check box will behave as follows:
Say Organization A is the parent organization of Organization B, and Organization C has a contract with Organization B as the billing organization. If the user goes to Items to Invoice, filters on Organization A, and selects the Show Sub-Organization Items check box, the table will NOT return items being billed under Organization C's contract (where Organization B is the billing organization).

When using the Export Wizard, there will be several new columns to export the billing organization name and address information. When exporting with generic XML, there will not be a <bill_to_company> element. Instead, the <cust_name> column will display the billing organization for items associated with a contract with a billing organization.

Best practice for QuickBooks users

In Autotask, when you generate an invoice for the billing organization, the invoice items are sorted by End Client organization. Currently, this information is not transferred to QuickBooks. We recommend that you include the End Client name in the title for tickets and projects that will be associated with a contract that has a billing organization. In this way, there will be a reference to the end client organization when you export to QuickBooks.

Comparison between parent/sub-organization and billing organization

The following table provides a comparison of different features in parent-sub-organization and Billing Organization relationships.

  Parent-Sub-Organization Billing Billing Organization - End Client Billing
Relationship between organizations The parent and sub-organizations must have a relationship configured in Autotask at the organization level. No relationship required. Any organization in your Autotask instance can be selected as billing organization in a contract.
Restrictions on relationships A parent organization can have multiple sub-organizations but a sub-organization can have only one parent organization. Multi-generation relationships are not allowed; that is, a sub-organization cannot be a parent to another organization and a parent organization cannot be a sub-organization to another organization. There are no restrictions on relationships between a billing organization and an end client organization. An end client organization can have an unlimited number of contracts, each with a different billing organization. An organization can be both an end client organization and a billing organization.
Reporting and Dashboard displays If a contract exists, revenue and costs are tracked with the contract organization, either the parent or sub-organization.
If there is no contract, the Invoice Settings setting "Invoice non-contract items to Parent Organization" determines whether the revenue and costs are reported under the parent or the sub-organization. 		Revenue and cost items are associated with the end client organization everywhere in Autotask.
Ticket and Project tracking in Client Portal If a Client Portal Client is a parent organization, portal resources with Manager or Advanced security level can view sub-organization tickets. If the billing organization is a Customer type organization, you can give billing organization resources access to the Client Portal to view end client ticket and project information related to the items that will be billed to their organization.
Contract required? Sub-organization billable items that are not governed by contracts can be billed automatically to a parent organization. You can select this option at the invoicing stage, or globally for an organization under Invoice Setting. A contract is always required to bill a billing organization for work done for the end client.
Miscellaneous Because parent organization and sub-organizations have a predefined relationship in Autotask, the Organization page for both parent organization and sub-organizations provides information about the related organizations. A billing organization is set up at the contract level. The name of the billing organization appears in the contract information.

The following flowchart shows which organization is invoiced for labor performed for a sub-organization, depending on contract and invoice settings .