Billing Plan

A billing plan is a schedule of individual billing dates for a single item in a sales document. You
can define a billing plan at header level, which is then valid for all items assigned to it.
Depending on the kind of business process you are carrying out, the system can automatically
propose one of two different types of billing plan:
periodic billing .
milestone billing.

Periodic billing means billing a total amount for each individual billing date in the plan. For
example, if you are creating a rental contract, the system can propose a schedule of monthly
rental payments, according to the length and conditions of the contract.

Milestone billing means distributing the total amount to be billed over multiple billing dates in
the billing plan. For example, you can use a billing plan for billing a make-to-order item that is
assigned to a project in the SAP Project System. When you enter the project-related maketo-
order item in the sales order (or assembly order), the system proposes a billing plan based
on milestones defined for networks in the project. As each milestone is successfully reached,
the customer is billed either a percentage of the entire project cost or simply a pre-defined
amount.

During sales order processing, the system determines from the item category whether a billing
plan is required and, if so, which type of plan: The type of billing plan that is determined at this
point is set up in Customizing and cannot be changed in the sales document. For each billing
plan you create, you can enter a freely-definable search term in the details screen of the billing
plan in the sales document. When you save the document, the system automatically assigns a
number that later uniquely identifies the individual plan. You can use the search term later to
locate specific billing plans.
Billing plans for rental contracts and billing plans for project-related milestone billing have
different overview screens so that you can enter data relevant to your processing. For example,
for milestone billing, you must be able to enter data to identify the individual milestones.