Progressive Billing Change Orders

When a change order is added to a job, you will typically create a single invoice for the entire change order. You might even group two or three change orders together on one invoice.

But sometimes, you may want to provide a progressive change order to your customers. You’ve billed 50% of the original job, and you want to match the change orders to 50% billing. Or maybe you want to request a partial payment to cover the design and engineering portion of a change order. Progressive Billing Change Orders is the way you do that!

Before you get started, however, there is a setting you need to turn on in Settings > Module Settings > Proposals > Accounting. You will need to place a tick in the Enable Change Order Progressive Invoices checkbox.

Back on the Sales Order Billing tab, you’ll notice a % Invoiced column in the Change Order billing portal. In our illustration above you’ll note that we have already invoice 50% of Change Order #1.

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1. To create a new progressive change order invoice, click the green Invoice button like you normally would.
2. Now click the Summary Invoice button to reveal a list of change orders. On the far right of the list, you’ll see two columns:
   • % Invoiced – shows you how much of this invoice has been previously invoiced
   • % To Invoice – this is where you enter the percent of the change order that you want to invoice
3. Enter the % of the change order to be invoiced.
4. Place a check in the Select to Add column
5. Click the blue Add Selected to Invoice

A new invoice will be created with the percentages of each change order you indicated.

Note: The percentage you enter to be invoiced is the total gross amount you want to invoice, and not an additional net amount.
For example, change order #1 is worth $12,000.
Our fist invoice for 50% will be $6,000.
If the next time we invoice, we enter 60%, the resulting invoice will be $1,200.

Title	Percent	Net Amount
1st invoice	50%	$6,000
2nd invoice	60%	Total $7,200
less previously billed		-$6,000
Balance to Invoice	10%	$1,200

Likewise, if your first invoice was 50% and your second invoice was 20%, the net result would be a credit of $3,600.
iPoint is going to make an adjustment to take the progressive change order invoice back to 20% of the original total.

Title	Percent	Net Amount
1st invoice	50%	$6,000
2nd invoice	20%	Total $2,400
less previously billed		$6,000
Balance to Invoice	-30%	-$3,600

Progressive Change Order Billing goes one step further.

Let’s say you have invoiced the 50% deposit for the entire job. You also have two change orders, one that has been billed at 10% and the other that has been billed at 30%.
Now it is time to invoice the job for the next 30% progress payment.
iPoint is going to create the 30% progress invoice and then prompt you to add 70% on change order #1 (taking the 10% to 80%) and 50% on change order #2 (taking 30% to 80%)

This is important to understand because of one of the options you have available to you.

Options

Let’s take a look at some of the other options available to you when you create a progressive change order invoice.

Disable Linked % Invoicing – When you check this box, iPoint will not suggest that change orders be billed to match the percentage of the overall job’s billing status as described above.

Add To Selected Invoice – If your customer has an existing invoice for this sales order that is not marked Submitted, you can select it from this dropdown. Then, when you create the percentage invoice, those lines will be added to the selected invoice. If you leave the dropdown empty, iPoint will create a new invoice with only the selected amounts included.

Summary Invoice button – We already discussed this button, but this is what you’ll use to pick the change orders and add the percentages to be invoiced.

View Invoice Lines button – This button will be visible if you have already invoiced a portion of the change order. The window that opens will show all of the different invoices that have been created so far for that change order line. This way you can see how much was invoiced and when.

Line Item Invoice button – This button is available if you are doing Line Item (not RFP) billing. Just be aware that if you do a 50% Line Item invoice on a change order for 1 television, for example, you are invoicing half of a TV. This would obviously have inventory ramifications as your inventory would be off by 1/2 of a TV. And no one wants to buy half of a TV!

Estimate to QB button – Some companies like to push their invoices to QuickBooks as an estimate. This is an optional process that is not part of the standard iPoint job flow.

View Estimate in QB button – Once you have pushed an estimate to QuickBooks, this button appears and clicking it will open the estimate in QuickBooks. Note: QuickBooks must be open on the machine where you are pushing the button.

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