Invoicing based on a payment plan with per-task revenue recognition

Some companies are particularly demanding when it comes to the level of detail in revenue recognition and invoicing. As such, viewing each project as a financial unit is insufficient.

This may be because every single task of a project has its own separate payment, which is released for invoicing as soon as the task is finished.

It may also be due to in-house procedures, revenue budgets (and bonuses) for individual departments, teams or employees. In these cases, dividing a project in a clearly defined and infrangible revenue framework might be prudent. Furthermore, this ensures that if a department, team or employee exceeds the budget on their part, the other parts of the project are not affected.

This is particularly interesting if payments for the individual sections of a contract are determined by the delivery. Example: a company who offers monthly salary management based on the number of payslips processed and supply consultancy at a fixed price per month. The easiest solution here is to group everything in one project and one contract while controlling the invoiced value for payslip processing only flows to work carried out on the payslip task.

In TimeLog
In TimeLog, the Task-driven revenue contract covers this scenario. As illustrated below, this contract combines the customer's payment plan and a number of tasks in the project plan. Unlike the Fixed price – standard contract, this type of contract lets you control exactly which parts of the payment plan go to which tasks and expenses.

By establishing a payment plan, the user can designate which task to link to the individual payment or choose to have the payment be part of a general payment plan. In this case, the task governs how much of the contract total is expendable.

See Figure 9 and Figure 10 for a comparison of the two fixed price contracts.