Purpose
Introduce the Billing Plans in Project System.
Overview
In general, a Billing Plan is a schedule of individual billing dates for a single item in a sales document. Simply, it is a list of dates when customers are scheduled to receive their accounts. It is possible to trigger the sending of those (customer) accounts via MILESTONES.
We can define a billing plan at header level, which is then valid for all items assigned to it
This can be done in two stages:
- Create the Milestones in Project System (PS).
- Attach Milestones to the billing Plan in SD (Sales & Distribution).
The Following is the figure for Milestone Object Relationship:
: 
NOTE: When Milestones are used with Networks to form the basis of a customer Billing Plan, only the initial % entered into the milestone is transferred to Billing Plan. Subsequent updates must be managed manually in the Sales Order
Types of Billing Plan
Depending on the kind of business process you are carrying out, the system can automatically propose one of two different types of billing plan:
- Periodic Billing - means billing a total amount for each individual billing date in the plan. For instance, if we are creating a rental contract, the system can propose a schedule of monthly rental payments, according to the length and conditions of the contract.
- Milestone Billing - means distributing the total amount to be billed over multiple billing dates in the billing plan. For example, we can use a billing plan for billing a make-to-order item that is assigned to a project in the Project System. When we enter the project-related make-to-order item in the sales order (or assembly order), the system proposes a billing plan based on milestones defined for networks in the project. As each milestone is successfully reached, the customer has billed either a percentage of the entire project cost or simply a pre-defined amount.
Process
During sales order processing, the system determines from the item category whether a billing plan is required and, if so, which type of plan: The type of billing plan that is determined at this point is set up in Customizing and cannot be changed in the sales document. For each billing plan we create, we can enter a freely-definable search term in the details screen of the billing plan in the sales document. When we save the document, the system automatically assigns a number that later uniquely identifies the individual plan. We can use the search term later to locate specific billing plans.
Note: Billing plans for periodic billing, e.g., rental plans and billing plans for project-related milestone billing have different overview screens so that we can enter data relevant to our processing. For example, for milestone billing, we must be able to enter data to identify the individual milestones.