How Billing Rule Caps Can Affect Charge Projections

The Charge Projections feature in OpenAir is a very customizable feature that can often lead to confusion amongst clients. For example, when running reports to see forecasted revenue based on resource bookings, the projected amounts do not always match what the client expects to see based on the data that was input into the system.

Billing Rule Caps

One scenario where this gap can occur is when clients are using the “cap” feature on time billing rules which limits the total amount that can be billed for the rule. The standard behavior of the system is to incorporate actual billed amounts to date when forecasting revenue using billing rules that have caps.

Below is an example scenario that demonstrates this behavior:

1.     A given time billing rule has a $10,000 cap
2.     $9,000 has been billed to date from this rule
3.     Charge projections are configured to use “Worked and Booked Hours”
4.     Total forecasted revenue based on bookings (booked hours times the rate on the billing rule) totals $5,000
5.     A forecasting report is run that uses the standard “projects – projected billing [rules]” reporting value
6.     The report only shows $1,000 in remaining revenue

Ignore Billed Amounts in Projections

So how does one show forecasted revenue based solely on the charge projections configuration and not have the system take into consideration actual billed amounts? Fortunately, there is an internal switch that can be enabled to meet this requirement. The switch is called “ignore actual billed amounts in projections.” Once enabled, the “projects – projected billing [rules]” value in projection reports will give the reporting user a true picture of forecasted revenue based on how charge projections are configured in the system.