Accelerated billing/invoicing for Projects in Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012–(Progress based billing)

Automated, accurate and faster billing in Projects is one aspect, which every professional service organization look as one of the winning factors, when they choose an ERP application for their organization.

Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 ERP is equipped with a powerful project billing engine, which helps in faster invoice processing by providing the various capabilities.

1. Transactions to be billed in a given time period are recommended automatically.
2. Automated workflow for invoice and submission and approval.
3. Automated and accurate progress based billing based on % of work complete in the project.
4. Support for complex billing scenarios such as T&M based, Milestone based, unit based billing etc.
5. Option to specify complex billing scenarios such as T&M based, Milestone based, Per unit billing etc.

In today’s post I will highlight one of the billing/invoicing features of AX 2012 which is the billing based on the progress of work in the project. This feature of AX 2012 allows professional services firms to automate the billing process without having the need of their project accounting staff spending days and weeks to determine the accurate completion stage of the project.

In Microsoft dynamics AX 2012, the project managers can set up the project in the system and define a budget for the project and then, the system can calculate the progress based periodic billable amounts automatically.

This can just be accomplished by executing the below simple steps.

1. Setup the Project and required basic details for it.

2. Setup the appropriate billing rule in the Project Contract.

3. Estimate the Project and establish a project level budget.

With the above minimal setup done, when project transactions are posted, AX 2012 system can calculate the current completion stage/percentage of the project automatically without having you the need of the project accounting staff doing to manually which will take a considerably longer time.

Based on the % complete for the project, system will automatically calculate the amount to be billed at the current state of the project.

This was just one method in the billing engine of AX 2012 and there are several others, which supports more complex billing scenarios.

Simple, Powerful !! This is it for today. Please contact me if you need further detailed and expert advise on billing capabilities of Microsoft dynamics AX 2012.

Keep DAXING

Sandeep