Billing and Line of Business

When Line of Business is enabled, your Contract Management or Accounting team has an entirely new set of tools to classify billing and expense items in Autotask. At the same time, the financial team's implementation of Line of Business is completely independent of, and will not interfere with, your service team's implementation. Each group can set up lines of business for their specific purposes.

The vehicle for this independence is the contract.

Contracts are billing arrangements that are owned by your Contract Management or Accounting team. Contracts can have a line of business that is different from the line of business selected on the ticket or project.

IMPORTANT  Billing and expense items associated with the ticket or project will inherit the line of business of the contract, not the parent entity.

  • Your contract managers can set up completely separate set of lines of business with the purpose of assigning billing items to the correct profit centers, or map them to QuickBooks classes. Refer to Mapping lines of business to QuickBooks classes and Exporting billing data.
  • At the same time, tickets and projects can be assigned to the line of business that makes the most sense for your service team. For a discussion of these objectives, refer to Data segmentation.

NOTE  Billing and expense items associated with a contract that has a different line of business than the ticket or project remain visible and can be managed on the ticket or project.

Use cases

The Line of Business feature makes it possible for customers to maintain more than one automatic invoice numbering sequence, one for each division they set up on the Organizational Structure page. Refer to Next invoice number (leave blank to disable automatic numbering).

When an invoice is created that contains billing items from multiple divisions, you get a warning that you have incompatible invoice number sequences, and a choice how you would like to proceed. Refer to About processing invoices when Organizational Structure is enabled and divisions have different invoice numbering sequences.

You can now search for, filter by and report on items and transactions by Division, Line of Business, or the pairing of Division > Line of Business.

  • Approve & Post, Un-Post, Items to Invoice, and Invoice History pages display Line of Business and Line of Business Contains Data filters.
  • The Items to Invoice and Invoice History pages also display a separate Division field to filter on.

NOTE  This lets you avoid issues with separate invoice number sequencing.

Many Autotask customers have been requesting better support for class tracking in QuickBooks. Classes are typically used when organizations have multiple types of revenue-generating activities, or multiple cost and profit centers. A class is assigned to each transaction, regardless of financial account or Customer/Job.

Both the Invoice Export to XML and the Billing Item Export to CSV make the Division > Line of Business information available for import into external accounting applications.

  • With the Invoice Export to XML, a "business_division_subdivision_name" is available at the invoice item level, and at the invoice level if all billing items are associated with the same line of business. Refer to XML data mapping.
  • With the .CSV export, the Line of Business column is included on the export table. Refer to Exporting billing data using the Export Wizard.

The ability to tag financial transactions with lines of business that reflect the priorities of the Finance department also enhances reporting in Autotask. "Division", "Line of Business", and a "Division > Line of Business" columns and filters have been added to a number of LiveReports categories. Refer to Line of Business impact on reporting.

Best practice recommendations

Only resources in the Finance Department should have access to them. This lets you optimize lines of business for billing, and keeps unauthorized users away from contract management.

If you want your Accounting resources to open the tickets and projects that are the parent entities of billing items, you must give them access to all lines of business, not just the financial ones.