During long-term projects, at your client's request or for your office management, you may need to issue an interim invoice before project completion.
Progress billing is when you need to take a payment from a client and you do not want to clear out the WIP until the project is completed. Once the project is completed you will create a final invoice that will clear out all the WIP and all the realization will be realized reflected in the month you cleared out the WIP.
With the progress bill option, it does post the positive and negative entries each month and carries the time forward. This allows you to get an accurate idea of the open total WIP. The realization report only calculates when the actual time entries are closed via an invoice. If you utilize the progress bill feature and close the time in December (this is the best practice that we are aware of ), then the realization will be current when looking at it for the entire year because of the spike of time spent in certain months. Viewing the Realization annually seems to give the most accurate depiction.
These Progress Bills can be handled in Firm360 by following the steps outlined below:
1. An admin user must enable the progress billing feature in settings.
2. Staff will record their time to the project as usual.
3. When ready to generate a progress bill, select Billing from the Black Ribbon. (Please note the Progress Bill feature is not available from the Clients Billing Dashboard).
Click "All". (Selecting entries automatically carries them forward to the next month as part of the Progress Bill process.)
4. From the gear icon dropdown, choose "Create Progress Bill".
5. Review and edit entries in the pop-up modal. Be sure to enter the progress bill amount. Click "Save".
6. Time entries selected will automatically be carried to the next month and a progress bill entry will now be on the Billing Dashboard for invoicing. An offsetting "Progress Bill" Billable Item is also created and carried to the next month. Click on "Invoice".
7. Edit description, etc., as usual for this invoice. Click "Save". An invoice will be generated.
8. Returning to the Billing Dashboard in subsequent months will show previous entries that have been carried as well as all progress bills and their offsets that have been generated.
9. At the close of the project, generate the final invoice selecting all items, including previous progress bills. Edit and Save as usual. For a simple Final Bill with Total Due, choose "Combine and Edit", enter desired description, then click "Submit".