Create a Contract with Fixed Payment Invoicing

Overview

Fixed payment contracts are used for services that repeat on a predictable schedule, like year-round lawn maintenance. Because the payment amount is the same each billing cycle, this simplifies invoicing and accounting for you and helps your customers with their financial planning.

This article explains how to create a fixed payment contract estimate. The steps below walk through a scenario where our company, Greenscene, has a new client, Camille's Oasis. They need year-round lawn maintenance including mowing, edging, fertilizer application, and weed control. We’ll create a contract estimate and set up a payment schedule so Camille pays a predictable amount in each bill.

Watch the video below or keep reading to learn more.

Training video

Requirements

To view opportunities you need either View My Opportunities or View Opportunities added to your user role.
To create or edit estimates, you need either Edit My Opportunities or Edit All Opportunities added to your user role.
To edit items within an estimate, you need the Edit Estimate Items permission added to your user role.

Steps

Follow these steps to create a fixed payment contract estimate:

Create a new contract opportunity, and set its Invoice Type to Fixed Payment. Fill in all other required and optional fields you need.
Create an estimate. Because all the work we’re estimating for Camille falls under one category, we have one service group called “Lawn Maintenance”.
Add the relevant services along with the necessary labor and material items. For our example, we add a mowing service and three separate rounds of weed control.
Once all services and items are on the estimate, enter the number of occurrences for each service in the OCC column. For our example, we enter 30 occurrences for the mowing service, which is a typical number for weekly mowing in the Midwest.
Note:
Entering occurrences for a service automatically applies the same number to all items within that service. The number of service occurrences determines how many work tickets are created when the opportunity is won.
If needed, update the quantity for any item. For our example, Camille's property only requires one hour of labor per mowing occurrence, so we leave it at 1.
When you’ve added all the necessary services, items, occurrences, and quantities, select the Opportunity tab in the upper left of the estimate screen to return to the opportunity.
On the Opportunity page, select the Complete button to finalize the estimate. Because this is a fixed payment contract, the Payment Schedule window opens automatically.
In the Payment Schedule window, use the Invoice on dropdown to choose when invoices are sent to customers.
Activate the Link completed tickets to invoice field if your customer wants a detailed record of work completed each month. If you enable this option, set the Invoice on field to Last of the Month so crews have time to complete their work tickets before the invoice is generated. For our example, we select First of the Month and leave the box unchecked.
In the Month column, deselect any months you don’t want to include in the payment schedule. Some customers may prefer to only pay during the months when you’re conducting work. For our example, we deselect all the months in which mowing likely won’t be needed.
Note:
The Start Date and End Date you set in the opportunity determine the months that appear in the Payment Schedule window. In our example, our opportunity date runs from March of one year to March of the next.
Now use the Spread Evenly or Spread and Round buttons to choose how you distribute the total contract cost across the selected months. Both options evenly distribute the total contract cost across the selected months, but Spread and Round also rounds each month’s cost to the nearest dollar. For our example, we select Spread Evenly.
Note:
Nothing in the Payment Schedule is final until you save, so feel free to experiment with payment distribution.
When you’re done setting up the payment schedule, select Save. This moves the opportunity to Approved status, and you can send the proposal to the client.
Once you’ve sent the estimate to the customer and they’ve accepted the proposal, open the opportunity and mark the estimate as Won.

Expected Results

After the opportunity is won, each occurrence of each service on the estimate becomes a work ticket. Invoicing Assistant automatically generates invoices at the correct times based on the payment schedule you set up.