1. Collective WIP reporting<br />Business Need<br />Management often needs to know how many billable hours by person are on billable projects, but it is too early to bill the client. To report WIP (Work in Process) of billable time and expenses in a project, it is necessary to run or simulate RRB (Resource Related Billing). Although some values and characteristics can be read from CO (Controlling) module or other sources, prices, adjustments and other characteristics are held in SD and only applied during RRB.<br />Creating a billing request somewhat solidifies RRB dynamic line items. Standard SAP provides some tools for simulation and accrual, but they fall short of full collective detail reporting: DP91 simulates the results for only a single sales document (customer and project) and does not easily report that simulation. It is possible to save a sales pricing which can be reported, but the characteristics and level of detail is limited. Results analysis detail is somewhat limited to cost element level accruals. Standard collective processing reports the status of successful processing of documents but little detail.<br />This limitation of the standard RRB reporting ability has created big costs for some companies. Professional services organizations have expended great efforts on less than robust solutions to capture this WIP at the level they need. Others have developed elaborate enhancements to allow updates and adjustments to billing requests from changed source data. <br />Solution<br />This solution enables a complete collective on-demand simulation of RRB to provide detailed reporting of WIP. Any number of documents/projects can be selected for processing, and practically any level of detailed reporting is possible. This reporting is available in ALV form and can be saved to database for use in other applications or reporting.<br />Convergence of fixed and variable priced items in DST billing<br />Business Need:<br />Some professional services are billed at a fixed price such as per diems and others at time and expense such as billable hours. The customer may expect both to be billed together in a single monthly invoice. Before this invoice is issued to the customer, the billers and management must review, modify and approve it.<br />The SAP standard solution for billing fixed price items uses billing plans. The solution for variable items uses RRB (resource related billing). The billing plan on the contract or order is invoiced directly. Resource related billing first creates a billing request that is subsequently invoiced. The billing request is a good mechanism for previewing the invoice and making any needed changes, but without the fixed price items, it is only a partial picture with an unknown fixed price component.<br />Solution:<br />With this solution, all variable and fixed price items are brought to the billing request. This billing request can be reviewed, modified, and approved without any later surprises.<br />Items with billing plans are still used, but these items are not invoiced directly. Instead, RRB reads these items and creates billing request items for the open billing plan lines.<br />Split Billing (Multiple payers)<br />Business Need<br />Multiple parties will split the costs of some matters especially with insurance companies or government agencies are involved. Professional services organizations need the ability to issue down payment requests and invoices to parties for the correct percentage due.<br />Solution<br />This custom development enables multiple agreements with different parties for the work done on a single matter or other cost object hiearchy. Each agreement defines the portion of the project for which the party is obliged to pay.<br />During billing, down payment requests and/or invoices are generated to the different parties in the amounts due.<br />Custom Source Billing<br />Business Need<br />It is common for professional service organizations to bill clients for time and expenses booked in CO module, but sometimes the billable items are stored in other SAP tables or even other applications outside of SAP. Bringing all the data into CO is unneccesary and often difficult.<br />Solution<br />It is possible to define custom sources as data in other places in or outside of ECC, but many considerations are needed to ensure accuracy and efficiency. Using the service oriented architecture, it is possible to read and bill data in external systems in real time without the need to interface the data to SAP tables.<br />Volume Discounts<br />Some companies have negotiated that after a certain number of hours or value of billings are achieved in a given month or year, they should be subject to a discount percentage on future work.<br />This discount could be immediately applied to subsequent invoices or added up for a rebate at end of year. The later ability is standard functionality, but the former requires some enhancement.<br />