Invoicing plan - Milestone billing

The invoicing plan feature is to schedule advancement payment of an order. Payments are based on the order’s completion progress.

Invoicing plans come in 2 flavour:

• stepped: where you configure predefined progression steps to trigger calls for payment.

• linear: where you can call for payment at any time, and optionally track progress per product.

More details in concept section Invoicing plan (Milestone billing).

Activating invoicing plans feature

Go to “General setting / Application settings / Features management”, scroll down or search for the “Orders” section.

There you’ll see 2 options related to invoicing plans:

1. The first one is to activate the feature in Portal (without it, no invoicing plan in Portal)

2. To activate product level order tracking, which will also forbid the use of stepped invoicing plans.

Milestone creation (stepped invoicing plans)

In Opencell you can use Invoicing plans, that allow you to invoice One Shot charges to the Billing account. This will be prior to the subscription creation. You can think of this feature as being user for projects which have a build phase (like a new SaaS solution implementation).

Invoicing plans are manager in the Customer care app. When you arrive on the page you will have a list view of all invoicing plans existing on your environment.

From this page, you can use the search bar or filters on columns to easily search for a specific invoicing plan. You can also download all existing plans via “Export table” button.

For creation, hit the “Create invoicing plan” button. You will then arrive on the creation page.
After you enter a description, chose a “progress invoicing mode” (“stepped” or “linear”), and optionally provide a code (it’ll be automatically generated if you don’t), hit ‘SAVE’ button.

You will now have your new Invoicing plan.

For linear plans, you don’t have anything else to configure.

However, for stepped plans, you will still need to add invoicing plan lines, to define all the steps you wish to have on your invoicing plan.

Hit the ‘CREATE’ button to start adding lines to your plan.

After creating a few lines, you can see them directly on the plan, as below:

Invoicing plan application

To start tracking the progress and call for payment, the order has to be finalized (hit button “Finalize”, (2) on the screenshot below), which indicate that you’re done building your order, and that it’s been sent to processing.

Stepped invoicing plan application

In our example we have created an invoicing plan with upfront payment of 20% and an additional payment of 50% at 50% progress.

We’ve order a “Build” offer with a subscription fee and a setup (build) fee:

By hitting the ‘FINALIZE’ button, I have started the invoicing plan.

We see that current progress is 0% and we have a new button to move to the next step:

We can also see at the bottom of the page that payment for the initial step has been called:
(20% of the total amount with tax of the setup fee = 1200€ x 20% = 240€)

After having progressed through all steps, order has been completed (status completed ):

And we can see the second call for payment and the final “setup” invoice (it doesnt include the subscription fee, only the setup fee):

Linear invoicing plan application

For linear invoicing plans, the display is a bit different.
On the order’s header, we still track current order progress, but also the progress already invoiced.
And you will notice a “Call for payment” button (greyed at first, as there’s no new progress)

On the section about order lines, you can enter progress for individual products using the “pencil” button:

Now you see that the “Call for payment” button is enabled, as global progress is greater than “invoiced” progress.

You can call for a payment and confirme on the popup:

You can call for as many payment steps as you want, and once global progress reaches 100%, the order will be completed (status completed ) and a final build invoice will be produced: