Previewing Billing & Revenue Transactions in OpenAir
Did you know that you can preview the actual billing and revenue transactions without running the ‘Pending’ summary reports?
Invoicing, revenue recognition, and month end processing always has a series of individuals involved in your organization at various points in the workflow. Checks and balances are put in place to ensure items are not overlooked, customers aren’t over-billed, and the forecast is in alignment with actuals. For many this means reviewing forecast reports from charge projections each week and comparing this information to project data like budget burn to date, Earned Value Metrics, or other KPIs you have developed within your organization.
One key part of the process which is requested many times is to have a ‘preview’ report of billings and revenue. This was always handled by having individual run the Advanced Pending Billings or Advanced Pending Recognition report, but this report has special functionality to allow users to actually create transactions. Permission to access this report has previously been restricted heavily to avoid inaccurate data. With the September 2012 release, a new set of detail reports called Pending Billings and Pending Recognition Transactions were made available. These reports have the same computation logic as the Advanced report Pending set but cannot create transactions.
Use of these reports are an excellent way to preview billing before doing actual billing. By running these pending detail reports, you can review detailed transaction data across project and administer any projects, rules, or timesheets that may need attention due to contract changes, caps being reached, or known customer situations impacting the final billing and revenue numbers.
To run the report, you must have
- An OpenAir role with permission to ‘View Reports’ on the project module
- An OpenAir role with permission to View Billing and/or View Recognition (to view this information on a report)
- Access to the Projects module (so you can see the projects module report options under Detail)
You will find the reports near the bottom of the Projects section under the Reports -> Detail page
When you access the report, you can decide which columns to display – this is a BIG advantage over the standard Advanced Pending Billing or Recognition report!!
And now you get transaction level detail to preview!
Want more OpenAir tips? We’ve pulled them all together into a convenient eBook of 50+ tips from the past year. Click here to find out how to get your copy.