Invoicing Overview

Overview

With the the Back Office Module, you can generate invoices to send to your customers through your AR/GL systems.  The Back Office module is not designed or intended to be a standalone AR/GL or pay/bill system.  The Back Office module enables your company to integrate through supported online or offline integrations with 3rd party AR/GL systems.

This article provides and overview of the invoicing functionality, as well as an explanation of terms and options.

What Can Be Invoiced?

There are two types of items that can be invoiced within Back Office.  Using the Back Office module, you can realize fees and generate invoices for these two primary item types.  

• Timesheets
• Products & Services

The Back Office module will then enable your finance team to send generated invoices directly into your AR/GL system using our supported integrations.  Invoices are generated in batches through the Generate Invoices screen.

Generating Invoices

• To Generate Invoices, the Back Office module must be licensed and enabled.
• In your ATS account, navigate to Back Office
• From the Back Office menu, select List Batches under the Invoices heading
• On the right, select the button that says Generate Invoices
• Step 1: Click the button that says Run Health Check.  If this button is greyed out and there are no errors, the health check automatically ran and passed.  There is nothing more to do
• Step 2: Set the first invoice number in the batch.  By default this will be one more than the last invoice number of the last batch of invoices generated.  After setting the right value, click the button that says Generate Invoices
• Step 3: Depending on your AR/GL Integration, you can either Download the new batch of invoices for offline accounting systems or Sync the new batch of invoices for online accounting systems
• Invoices generated in the batch are then available for future reference, download or sync from the List Batches screen

Batches

The Back Office Module groups generated invoices into groups called batches.  A batch is a group of 1 or more invoices with invoice line items.  Batches can be downloaded or synced with your AR/GL system depending on your AR/GL Integration.  See the section below on statuses, which describes the life cycle of pay lines, invoices and line items, for more information on invoices.  To access previously generated batches, follow these steps.

• To List Batches, the Back Office module must be licensed and enabled.
• In your ATS account, navigate to Back Office
• From the Back Office menu, select List Batches under the Invoices heading

From this screen, you can see pending invoices and previous batches.

Timesheet Invoices

Timesheet invoices are generated from a combination of the fees realized from to billable hours captured within the Timesheet module multiplied by the Bill Rate terms defined within a Requirement record.

On the List Batches screen, the Amount: Timesheets field in the Pending list aggregates the total amount due for approved, pending timesheets.

Products & Services Invoices

Product & Services invoices are generated from a combination of the products described in the catalog along with the fees captured during fee realization, which occurs when creating a placement during the submittal workflow.

On the List Batches screen, the Amount: Products & Services field in the Pending list aggregates the total amount due for one-time and scheduled catalog items that have realized fees.

Pay Lines, Invoices and Line Items

The back office module uses an advanced scheduler to generate appropriate invoices and line items for your AR/GL system.  During the course of business operations, your teams will perform activities that should be billed for.  We refer to this as fee realization.  Fees are realized during the course of business as pay lines, and once they are ready to be invoiced, an invoice is generated.  Invoices are generated by invoking the Generate Invoice operation within the back office module.

Pay lines are realized fees that have not yet been invoiced or paid.  Pay lines can have the following statuses.  The process of converting a pay line to a line item within an invoice is invoicing.

Statuses

Company Assignments

The Back Office Module allows you to assign products and services to specific companies within your organization. This Company Assignment feature ensures that each Billto organization receives the appropriate invoices and maintains a clear hierarchy for billing purposes.

Billto

The Billto represents the organization that will be invoiced for a product or service. Each Billto organization is uniquely identified by its account name attribute. This ensures that invoices are sent to the correct recipients and helps maintain accurate billing records.  The Billto is defined by the field value called Account Name and can be found as an attribute of each entity within the Billto Hierarchy.

Billto Hierarchy

The Billto Hierarchy is the data model which allows you define how your customers will be invoiced for the products, services and timesheets your company delivers to them.  The Back Office module implements an optimistic approach to assignment of Billto Account Names when generating invoices.  This is based on the design of the module which uses the lowest assigned node within the Billto hierarchy as the assigned Billto.  The table below outlines the Billto Hierarchy at a high level.