Problem:
Using Jobs in Business Central, how do I account for receiving and paying for services as they are incrementally incurred when the vendor has quoted a lump sum and the customer needs to be invoiced a lump sum?
The current job setup used is with one Budget and Billable line, a Qty of 1 and lump sums for the unit cost and unit price. This works great for billing the customer the lump sum but poses a problem if the services from the vendor are received and invoiced to the job incrementally.
Solution:
For each service to be procured incrementally but budgeted as a lump sum and billed to the customer as a lump sum, create 2 Job Planning Lines under a single Job Task. One job planning line selecting Budget for Line Type and a second selecting Billable. Why? By using 2 job planning lines of the different types, you can procure and record job costs incrementally while preserving a quantity of one with a lump sum for billing the customer.
For the budget job planning line, “flip” how you enter quantity and the unit cost. Enter the lump sum amount as the quantity and $1.00 as the unit cost. (If you have been enabling Usage Link, make sure you select it on these budget lines.) When you get an invoice for some of the services, you can now receive the partial amount by entering this amount as the quantity. Using this approach, you can receive and pay for the services incrementally. If you enter the Budget with a quantity of 1, you can’t do this.
For the billable job planning line, enter the quantity as 1 with the lump sum as the unit price. This will allow the invoice the customer receives to correctly show the quantity and lump sum. Billable lines are used for invoicing in the same manner as Budget and Billable lines.
For the above scenario, we are capitalizing on the benefit of separating budget from billable to allow for different methods of tracking and invoicing for procurement versus sales. We can’t do this if we select Budget and Billable for the Line Type.
