A billing plan is a schedule of individual billing dates for a single item in a sales document. You can define a billing plan at header level, which is then valid for all items assigned to it.

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 or milestone billing.

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 you create, you can enter a freely-definable search term in the details screen of the billing plan in the sales document. When you save the document, the system automatically assigns a number that later uniquely identifies the individual plan. You can use the search term later to locate specific billing plans.

Billing plans for rental contracts and billing plans for project-related milestone billing have different overview screens so that you can enter data relevant to your processing. For example, for milestone billing, you must be able to enter data to identify the individual milestones.