Halo Implementation Series – Billing Plan Combinations – Video 14

so hi everyone and welcome to another installment in the Halo implementation series with me again I think anyone who watches this uh this channel is going to know what I'm going to say now anyone is is um with me today I have my favorite person Mr Halo himself Morgan espinel um how you doing Morgan yeah very well good to see you again Chris um I've heard there's been some uh requests to to get these videos out I know that we we missed one last week so it's really positive to hear the community are getting value from the videos absolutely well actually what they've actually said is we're missing seeing Mr Halo and we wish we could see him again we don't care about Chris Timm we're actually just interested in Mr Halo because uh they they like they like they like the fact that I'm stroking your ego so yeah yeah basically that's what they were saying is they were saying actually if if Morgan did this on his own on his own channel we'd be happy we'll uh no I'm kidding I'm joking but yeah no really good to see you again Morgan and um what we're going to do today is we're going to talk about kind of billing plan combinations and billing templates you know we've we've talked about setting up agreements we've talked about Labor billing um you know we've we've done a few other videos around um other ways of billing and other ways of of invoicing in the system so we're going to bring all of that together using billing plan combinations and how do we include and exclude labor and all of that kind of thing and that then should tie up our whole kind of um you know billing area within the implementation um Series so does that sound good to you Morgan absolutely yeah let's go ahead as as Chris just mentioned uh and as I mentioned in the last couple of sessions uh We've looked at the creation of recurring invoices and agreements and the whole sort of procurring aspect on that side we then looked at the labor billing uh as a sort of completely separate function and I I promised that at a later date we would come back and we would see how it all ties together and this is that session so we're going to be looking at our billing plan combinations and we're going to be seeing how we tie our agreements back to the the labor billing and how we specify billable labor or you know more generally speaking how we specify labor to be allocated towards an agreement or you know potentially be billable so um let's Jump Right In so billing plan combinations are configured on a per customer basis so we can go into a customer record and while you're doing this sorry I was just going to very quickly say while you're doing this what I wanted to to kind of point out is is Halo works very differently too those of you coming in from from all the tasks um you know Auditors calls these exclusions and it works very differently to Halo so Halo you have to include the stuff you know that you want to add so if you wanted to include labor as part of the um you know the contract then you would add that as billing plan combination whereas with with all the tasks for example it's an exclusion so you you know you say I don't want to include labor oh sorry I don't want to include on site support so I don't want to include remote support and you exclude it because by default everything is included within the contract so just um just thought I'd point that out if anyone is is coming in you know having used a different um a different tool cool thanks uh so we'll see against the billing tab for a customer record a billing plan combinations header and in here we have this table of contents so I like to think of billing plan combinations in Halo as uh sort of billing rules so we saw a long time ago the concept of ticket rules where you can really break ticket rules down into two components there's a criteria component and an outcome component if the criteria is met the outcome is applied the same is true for our billing plan combinations where we have our criteria section and our outcome section so in our billing criteria section this is where we're specifying what types of time what types of activity what types of tickets Etc um this time is being added to in order to match this combination and then below uh once matched what billing plan do we apply so we'll see in our criteria we have the option to select a site and ITIL ticket type a charge type any of our category values more recently the ability to specify whether or not the time being added is inside or outside of your working hours um and then based on the options here we have our billing plan where the options in our billing plan contain the agreement or agreements for the customer or if we want to have the time go to towards an agreement for a different customer record we can check this box and then we get all of our agreements uh the other options include don't invoice at all uh pay as you go which is just build uh you know goes onto an invoice build at the hourly rate based on what we configure in the charge type or the customer level override check the last uh session in the series to get a better understanding of what I mean by that or prepay and again we'll we'll be talking about prepaid in an upcoming session yeah so um let's just add something in here just so I can explain what we're doing so we can see as we're adding those billing plans in uh rows will be added into this table so let's add another one and let's say that this is for uh tickets of isil type incident and we'll say that is going to go towards the agreement now a very important concept when it comes to these billing plan combinations in Halo is that Halo will check through the customer's billing plan combinations sequentially when trying to evaluate the billing plan that a time entry should be allocated towards now that's important because that should determine the way that you set these billing plan combinations up so this is a great example the the top record is saying for all time on tickets of any type with any charge type used against it and have that time go towards pay as you go and then we have a row below with a higher sequence that says anytime on an incident a ticket of ital type incident will go towards the customer's agreement now this second row will never match because effectively we've put our catch-all before we've put anything else so it's very important when you're configuring these to make sure that you have your specific criteria uh high up in the list and then your catch all if applicable right at the bottom and we'll actually see that you know Halo goes through these rows sequentially and if it can't match any of the rows in our billing plan combinations table we do have a sort of failover a fallback and that is what is set here as this treat unmatched so we can say that by default time would or would not be billable yep cool so uh let's put a couple let's put a couple of billing plan combinations in here uh that's the sequence and let's just say that uh remote support is going to be covered by the contract by the agreement uh and any other time will actually be considered as billable so I'll save that cool so the outcome here should be that when we're adding time onto tickets for Terry's chocolates uh if we're using the remote support charge light then the time will be allocated towards the agreement else it will be considered as billable we'll go towards an invoice eventually so let's put that to the test so here's a ticket for Terry's chocolates salad private notes remote support on here one hour and again it's important that you have watched the previous session where we cover the concept of charge types and labor billing in general because I'm going to be brushing over a lot of details that were covered in that session uh so just a word warning uh anyway we move forward let's have a look at this time entry and in our time tracking tab under our billing details we can see the billing plan here has been allocated towards that agreement now uh below that we actually see that the hours have been billed and there's no contract hours so just want to clarify what's going on here so the time entry has been allocated towards the agreement that's what this billing plan is saying however this one hour would still go on to an invoice and there's a couple of reasons why that might be the most common from my experience is that the time the allotted time on this agreement is either set to zero or has been reached previously so again a couple of sessions ago when we were looking at the construction of agreements we saw we had that hours per period so if we set our hours period to eight and this was the the ninth hour allocated towards that agreement that would still be built it's still going towards the agreement it will still be added to the periodic history for the agreement so you can see that it has been allocated towards that agreement but because the uh you know the consumable hours have been consumed that would be billable so let's go and take a very quick look at Terry's chocolates agreement and it goes without saying if you did that as a as a you know unlimited hours then it should never really fall into any kind of billable thing because it will always be allocated against the agreement if it was using unlimited hours yeah absolutely correct so we can see here that the hours per period is zero meaning that all of the time that goes towards this agreement would still go on to an invoice but it would still be allocated towards this agreement which can be useful for reporting further on down the line because then you can start to figure out what agreements what buckets of time uh or what what buckets the time is allocated to whether it's on an invoice or not you might want to to specify that at some point in the future what I'll do is Chris as you mentioned uh you can set the the hours per period to unlimited it's effectively an all-you-can-eat agreement which means when I recalculate my billing now foreign we're still going towards that agreement but the build hours has gone to zero and the contract hours has gone to one denoting that this time will not go on to an invoice because it has been consumed by the allotted time for the agreement in question we can also see that against the time entry itself so this did say build hours or billable hours that's now been updated to reflect that it's instead contract happens yep so let's add another time entry on this time we're going to use it on site support I mean before I even do that we can see that the build I was here uh well we can see that the time is considered as billable and not going towards the agreement and again in the time tracking tab we can see the billing plan is pay as you go because of course this time we're not using our remote support charge type hence the billing plan combination is not satisfied we hit our yep we hit our uh treat as unmatched which is pay as you go meaning that if we press forward with this close it off so we should have one hour billable and one hour included in the contract now yeah yeah review our time entries uh so I think it might already be reviewed actually um or not let's see what's going on with that so awaiting review my charge let's review all of those interesting let's find out why that time entry is not popping into ready for invoicing so foreign sets that I go through um when thinking about this kind of stuff and I think I can already see what's happened here and the first thing that I want to do is I want to go to the ticket I want to go to my time entry and I want to make sure that it is in uh ready for invoicing so we want to make sure the time is billable which we've already established that is the case and then we also want to make sure that it is in ready for invoicing I then also just noticed that I added that time to a project task which would mean that it would land in the projects section of ready for invoicing um the reason that it's not is likely because there's some further configuration that we need to apply here I don't want to go into that in too much detail in this session but we will be looking at time billing for projects uh in an upcoming session so I'm not I'm for now I'm just going to change that ticket to an incident recalculate my billing And Then There It Is in training so um for the because this session we're just looking at billing blank combinations I don't want to dive into the project building just yet but I I promise we will come back to it but now let's create the invoice for this uh what is now an incident and see that there's only going to be the on-site labor that is added to the invoice so time that is consumed by the allotted hours for an agreement will not go on to an invoice uh that's not to say that we can't return that on the invoice PDF we can create reports in Halo to return the consumed hours within the agreement and sort of present them back onto the invoice PDF so what you can do is you can generate the invoice it will have all of the actual chargeable time on it and then below it can say well this is also all of the time that isn't chargeable again uh we'll we'll come back to we'll loop back to that when we start looking at the the more worked examples I suppose yeah yeah and I think that's a good thing to to look at because I think we have a lot of um we always have questions around that is you know how do we how do we customize the invoice and change the invoice and things like that so I think that would be good to to to do that as a separate session on its own yeah yeah for sure we'll we'll sort of look at um some of the core fundamentals of HTML when it comes to the PDF generation and some of the other cool features that we can add to the respective documents but yeah a conversation for another time I suppose so um we saw there that the the billing plan combinations are set up on a customer by customer basis however uh you can imagine that is quite time consuming especially if you have six or seven different billing plan combinations perhaps looking at six or seven different categories for your ticket and you've got 200 customers that is uh that could be quite a lengthy exercise so that's where billing templates come into the conversation so in configuration billing we have this billing templates module and so fundamentally what our billing templates are is there a template for billing plan combinations right so let's add a billing template in that says remote only or a billing template for remote only and again we see that billing plan combinations table appear below same logic applies we're going through sequentially it's got the same options in here site ideal ticket type charge type and then of course we have our billing planners the outcome this time we're just saying move that towards the the client's agreement we're not picking a particular agreement because this is a more General template for what will be the billing Clan combinations or a customer so we can just leave that like that and then I might want to add another one in that sort of all you can eat or all inclusive that just says all time no matter the type the charge type the category all time is covered by the customers agreement yep now there's still there's still a little bit of work that needs to um sort of that needs to be undertaken to add these two to your customers uh it's certainly a lot quicker than setting the billing plan combinations up one at a time but basically when you're using your billing templates when you have the billing templates module enabled you will also see again under the billing tab for a client under our billing plan combinations we now have this billing template option so I'm going to do is I'm going to take that out and then apply uh the remote only for example and that line that I added into my remote only billing template is now automatically applied uh again it's going to become a lot more useful when you've got seven or eight rows in here uh for different clients based on the the different standardized types of Labor that would be covered by an agreement versus what wouldn't be covered by an agree what is also really handy with the billing templates is once you have applied your billing templates to your customer records you can then update the billing plan combinations within the template and you see this button here to update the respective customers so I might want to say that actually this is only remote support on uh tickets of ITIL type incident I can save that and then click my update customer records and that change that we apply to the billing template once will then flow down to all of the customer records that have that billing template apply to them so uh still a little bit of time to go into the customers and select the drop down a lot quicker than adding the records in each time but then the Real Time Saver is if you ever have to change your billing template you're now changing it once instead of changing it perhaps 150 times so that's quite a handy a handy point to note as well yeah and then finally I just want to mention one one more way that we can make use of our billing plan combinations and that is actually within an agreement itself we have our charge types uh tab now notice how in this charge types tab there's already a record in here in our billing plan combination section so what we can do here is actually add billing plan combinations into this table that are then automatically set to be covered by the agreement so this goes back to what you were saying Chris where in Auto task you have exclusions yeah whereas in Halo you have inclusions so in Auto task I I think you can correct me if I'm wrong in order to ask you go to an agreement and you say in that agreement this is not covered this type of Labor is not covered that type of Labor is not covered in Halo it's the opposite you go to the agreement and you say this type of Labor is covered this type of Labor is covered and so on yeah exactly that it would be remote support or remote supports normally always covered but you know on-site support for example is not covered right yeah and so it does it the other way around if you have it as an exclusion where it's not covered it then bills for it and then if it if it isn't in a it assumes that it is covered and therefore it's it's um it's automatically built against that contract yeah cool um so just just to say this I mean the way I normally set these up for for um uh you know when I when I'm Consulting for a customer is you can do kind of both the ways you do it here very often I set them up when I'm setting up the contract for the customer so I'm going to go you know I'm going to set up this contract for the customer and then I'm going to set your billing plan combination up at that point rather than going into the customer record and setting it up so it doesn't really matter um I guess at this point where you do that um you know my theory on that is you've got to set up the contract anyway so you might as well set up the billing plan combination at the same time um but yeah but but it's nice to be able to kind of do that at the customer level and set it all up and then um and then when you build the contract it's already there yeah yeah exactly yeah it's it's um again you know Halo has the flexibility to allow people to set things up the way that they want it to be set up um best practice is really down to the way that your Agreements are structured um if if you have agreements that cover certain types of work it's probably going to be easier to go to the contracts and set the combinations up within the contract um if you have um different made maybe you've got like a prepay record per client as well that might uh not be a contract or maybe you have uh some time that you want to not be billable versus time you do want to be available versus time you want to go to a contract if you if you're if you start to diverge from the is it covered by a contract yes if not billable then you probably want to start looking at filling templates so yeah yeah absolutely I think either on I I do think um you know that's where the flexibility is is so nice it's giving you the ability to say well you know I want to think about this every single contractor set up or like I said I mean you know if if every one of your customers has um you know on-site support always in always excluded um or or in this case always included then you might want to have that as a um uh you know as a template so that you can say for every time I build a customer I'm just going to add that template so that it's always including on-site work rather than maybe doing it every time you add the the contract so yeah it really depends I think on on how you want to work um but I bet it's good to see that it's basically in both places and you can kind of do it in in any way really yeah yeah I suppose the the other point to note is the billing templates allow you to bulk update what is and is not covered so if you have very standardized types of agreements and you're you saying you know as of 2024 uh this is now covered by everyone that has X type of agreement again you might want to make a template for that allowing you to make that change once uh if you were doing it agreement by agreement you'd then have to remember to go into all of the agreements that were that type and update all of those uh individually so individually yeah yeah no you're right it makes sense if you just do it kind of at a um at the template level so so um yeah there you are basically that's how you do billing plan combinations and how they kind of tie um tie everything together um and you know how you can use them in in you know against the customer or against the contract um so yeah thank you thank you for doing that Morgan really appreciate it again and I think that's pretty much really nicely wraps up our whole billing um you know billing side of this implementation um so if there's any questions anyone has anything they don't understand you know leave a comment um below and we'll we'll get back to you um as soon as we can I mean if there's anything else that you want to see specifically around billing we are going to focus on on kind of you know invoice creation and updating the invoices and how those all work um but if you wanted to see anything else specifically again leave a comment um below and we will absolutely get back to you as soon as we can awesome boom so thank you so much again Morgan I really appreciate it and thanks as always to Halo for allowing us to do these um they they really are helping there's a lot of people who are looking at these videos and like we said at the beginning a lot of people are asking for these things so we'll keep doing them until people stop asking um and uh yeah so look forward to seeing you on the next one awesome yeah always a pleasure and see you on the next one thanks have a good one Cheers Cheers guys bye-bye