Milestone Billing Guide

Milestone Billing is a new practice in ProWorkflow, and as such, you may need some help in moving your time-based or fixed value invoices through to a milestone based billing orientation.

So long as you have the financial package and are on our Nexus platform, you may be starting your project in a state like the one below. This is a project where a template has been added, and we may have rates attached to our tasks as well as allocated hours. Importantly, Phases have been added, as you can see with the headings 'Planning', 'Procurement' and 'Warehousing'. These will functionally be our milestone labels, so its important to include them.

Once we have this base level of information, let's go to the Financials Tab. That will initally look something like this:

The main column we want to look at it the Bill Total tab. This is where we determine how we will be billing our clients. The best option for milestone billing would be, as you may have guessed, 'Billable Phases/Milestone Billing'. This will let us identify a dollar value for each given phase, as we created them during the item creation step.

While you may already have a clear idea as to the value of your Milestones on the basis of your deliverables, it can be helpful to look at the Cost and Budget column when determining these values. Cost can tell you, using your allocated hours, how much the project will cost in terms of expenses and staff overheads. You can use either a per item or per staff cost rate in doing so. This figure would be extremely useful/critical if your milestone billing was based on a 'cost plus' model of pricing. The Budgeted column, on the other hand, will inform you how much your project might theoretically have been billed at under an hourly model. It will calculate your potential charge amounts based on assigned rates and allocated hours, and as such, provide a figure that describes where you otherwise might have priced the project. You may want to take this value and round up slightly, as this will provide roughly the same profit margins, while also providing some padding if any activities end up going overtime/project costs otherwise increase.

Now that we have our fiscal values entered in, we can create a quote and invoice for our client.

With quoting, there are few options to actively select. Simply Create the Quote, click next, and then choose all phases, as to include them all in a single document.

At this stage, you'll be left with something similar to the below which is functionally ready to be sent to the client.

The process for invoicing will be much the same as quoting, although here it may make sense to bill periodically, as opposed to billing all in one document at/near the end of your project.

You'll want to choose the 'Fixed/Billable Price' option as a start.

From here, choose the phases/milestones that you'd like to bill. In the example below, we have already created invoices for the first three phases of the project, and as such, they are struck through and not selectable. This means it would be impossible to accidentally double-bill for the same phase. Simply click on the next phase you'd like to bill for, and hit create.

We hope this has been a helpful guide. Please reach out to staff should you have any questions.