The Feature

Oracle Project Billing – Show Me the Money!

March 17, 2006 on 10:41 pm | by Marian Crkon | In Reviews | 2 Comments |  Print |  Email

Oracle Project Billing is another core application in the Oracle Projects Suite 11i.10. It provides the ability to define revenue and invoicing rules for your projects, generate revenue, create invoices, and integrate with other Oracle Applications. It enables you to enter project customers and contacts with whom you have negotiated and contracted project work, define customer agreements (purchase orders, service agreements, contracts, etc.) from your customers and fund projects with those agreements. It provides ways to generate revenue using various methods including time and materials, percent complete, and cost plus, and create draft invoices from detail transactions and milestones for online approval by your project or accounting managers. Project Billing can automatically generate accounting entries for your revenue and invoices, and interface revenue to Oracle General Ledger and invoices to Oracle Receivables while maintaining a detail audit trail.

What it Can Do…

Billing Configuration

• Set up billing information, including customer, billing cycles, sales credit receivers, and retention terms
• Define billing methods for different contract projects or by top task for invoicing
• Set up bill rates for time and materials projects
• Define employee, job title and non-labor bill rates
• Assign and override bill rates and discounts

Agreements and Funding

• Define agreement types and templates
• Fund at project or task level
• Fund different projects across operating units
• Revaluate funding to match currency fluctuations
• Control billing by project or top task
• Define Customers by project or top task
• Enter agreements, bill rates, and events in any currency
• Configure hard and soft funding (revenue budget) limits
• Define currency conversion attributes
• Funding Multiple Projects and Tasks

Revenue Accruals

• Accrue revenue using time and materials, cost reimbursable, and fixed price methods
• Accrue revenue for a single project or range of projects
• Calculate potential revenue by percent spent or percent complete
• Accrue costs in the same period that that revenue is generated
• Review and adjust revenue accrual online

Invoice Generation

• Generate invoices based on defined milestones
• Use flexible invoice line formats to summarize invoice lines by different attributes
• Review and adjust invoices online
• Create Discounts, credit memos and write-offs
• Drill down from invoice to detailed transactions online
• Generate inter-project invoices to share costs and revenue between projects

Billing Analysis

• Create and view billing review reports
• Create and view billing process flow reports
• Invoice Flow Detail and Summary Reports
• Potential Revenue Summary Report
• Project Billing Status Report
• Revenue Flow Detail Report
• Analyze Billing Status in Funding Inquiry

Integration

Oracle Project Billing integrates with other Oracle applications including General Ledger, Payables, Project Contracts, and Receivables, as well with third-party applications through open, standards-based architecture.

What Works Great…

• AutoAccounting generates revenue and invoice accounting entries based on pre-defined rules to hidden from end users. It’s great to have an ability to define separate rules for different accounting functions.

• Integration with Other Applications is definitely a strength. Once you define your rules, integration with Project Costing, General Ledger and Receivables is effortless.

• Inter-Company and Inter-Project Billing is very useful for companies who need it.

• Multi-Currency Support for costing and billing is great.

• Online and Self-Service Inquiries including Funding Inquiry, Review Revenue, Invoice Review, and Project Status Inquiry make it easy to review project billing balances at glance. I noticed the Search button (Flash Light) does not work consistently in all Find windows.

• Potential Labor Revenue Report is a great way to see what labor revenue will be recognized, or needs to be fixed before it can be recognized.

• Billing Extensions provide a great way to extend the functionality of Project Billing. I also like the fact that more and more extensions are becoming the standard billing functionality.

• Revenue Audit Report is very helpful when reconciling project revenue to General Ledger.

• Unbilled Receivable/Unearned Revenue Views are great for reconciling revenue and receivable balances.

… and What Could Work Better

• Agreements Upload It is great to have the new API to upload agreements; but a new WebADI upload integrator would even better.

• Events Upload Same as above, the new API is great, but a WebADI upload integrator is still needed.

• Find Agreements The Agreements form needs a Find window with Customer, Agreement Number, Agreement Type, and Project Number as parameters.

• AutoAccounting is a great feature, but there are also several limitations, which sometimes make it frustrating to use. For example:

• Lookup Sets Having no validation in lookup sets provides great flexibility and maintenance nightmare. Just imagine a business with several hundred to several thousands departments. Imagine you change hundreds department names in HR. Since there is no API, or interface, you have to replicate all name changes in your lookup sets manually. Why not build parameters into lookup sets similar to AutoAccounting Rule parameters? You could store intermediate values based on value IDs, not actual values, so that any changes would be automatically reflected in lookup sets.
• Receivable Accounts could use more parameters to be able to create more robust rules.
• Error Reporting during revenue and invoice generation processes could be better. The “Invalid AutoAccounting” error just doesn’t provide enough detail.

• Billing Rates Upload and Maintenance Bill Rate Schedules could use a new API and WebADI upload integrator. Typically you maintain several hundreds rates in a typical rate schedule (e.g. by job title).
• Revenue Reporting There are no revenue reports (similar to expenditure detail and expenditure summary) by revenue type, revenue category, etc.
• Unbilled Expenses Reporting It would be useful to have a report showing what billable expenses are to be billed (similar to Potential Labor Revenue report).

For more information about Oracle Project Billing, refer to other Oracle resources:

• Oracle Project Billing Data Sheet with an overview and summary of key features.

• Oracle Project Billing User Guide 11i (OTN login is required)