Billing Plan
Purpose
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.
Periodic billing means billing a total amount for each individual billing date in the plan. For example, if you 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, you can use a billing plan for billing a make-to-order item that is assigned to a project in the SAP Project System. When you 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 is billed either a percentage of the entire project cost or simply a pre-defined amount.
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.
Note
For more information about project milestones, see the Production Planning documentation about the Project System
.