Invoice Timing

When does your company invoice in NetSuite? There are a variety of options and is mostly impacted by industry type.

Standard Manufacturing

📃 Upon fulfillment (daily). Requires the Billing Operations feature to be enabled. This will invoice once daily per billing schedule. If you want to run invoicing twice daily (noon/5:00p), then create two billing operations.

📃 Upon fulfillment (automatic). While it is a relatively easy script to write, we still advocate for the use of Billing Operations to reduce system processing on transactions. Is there really a strict requirement to invoicing at the exact moment of fulfillment vs. noon or end of day?

Project Manufacturing

📃 Upon project milestone. Requires the Project Management and Advanced Billing features to be enabled. Create a Milestone Billing Schedule and apply to projects.

📃 Interval invoicing using percent complete. Requires the Project Management and Advanced Billing features to be enabled. Create a Billing Schedule and apply to projects.

📃 Combination of fixed fees, interval billing, time & materials and expense pass through costs. This uses Charge-Based Billing and is worthy of its own topic.

Service

📃 Time & Materials. Requires the Bill Costs to Customers and Time Tracking features to be enabled.

Other

📃 Via CSV import.

📃 Via integration/third party.

📃 Via staging tables (subrecords) and use of map/reduce script.

❗ Last but not least, some companies still invoice manually. If you are still manually invoicing, can you apply any consistent logic to auto-generate invoices? Keep in mind that you can add an approval process to review the auto-generated transactions before sending to customers. It may help that no revenue gets missed!