Easier Billing of Lump Sums
Lump sums are the subject of many contracts. They come in many different forms:
- travel lump sums
- maintenance lump sums
- flat-rate fees
- and many more
Lump sums that are added to every invoice are easy to manage. It becomes more difficult when lump sums are to be charged according to specific rules – e.g. according to the duration of the journey, number of overnight stays or other criteria. For such scenarios, we have added a new rule article to teamspace that can check and automatically settle lump sums even according to complex conditions.
Exemplary Billing Scenarios
In the following, we present three scenarios that are difficult to settle in the conventional way. With the new teamspace rule articles, on the other hand, settlement is quite simple, because the system automatically checks whether all conditions for settlement of the lump sum have been met.
Scenario 1: Simple Maintenance Lump Sum
As a specialist company for photovoltaic systems, your team of technicians regularly visits customers to check and maintain their solar systems. The maintenance visit is billed by the hour, but you charge a lump sum of 50 euros for checking the photovoltaic storage system, regardless of how long the check takes.
Your service team books all service times as usual via teamspace online time tracking. If the customer has a storage facility, the maintenance time for it is booked to a separate item “Storage maintenance”. The rule article now automatically ensures that the maintenance lump sum appears on the invoice instead of the hourly rate.
Scenario 2: Staggered Travel Lump Sum
You charge customers a lump sum for your service team’s travel to the site. However, you want to prevent the tours from becoming too long overall. For this reason, you charge an additional lump sum of 100 euros for travel times of more than two hours.
Your team books the arrival and departure times as usual. The rule article now automatically checks whether the time booked on the journey is more than two hours. If this is the case, the additional travel time is automatically transferred to the invoice. Journeys that are shorter than two hours are billed regularly.
Scenario 3: Complex Travel Lump Sum
Your consulting team for complex installations often travels for several days and works directly at the customer’s site. A separate lump sum of 300 euros applies for overnight stays. Two conditions must be met for this to apply:
– The consultant stays with the customer for a total of at least two days.
– He or she works on site for at least six hours per day.
A special rule article now checks the billable travel times. If at least six working hours were booked on each of at least two consecutive days, the overnight lump sum is applied.
The Solution for your Settlements
Do you charge complex per diems to your customers? Then the rule articles in the teamspace invoicing software are an ideal solution for you. Just contact our consulting team directly, we will be happy to help you.