About Billing Codes

This topic provides information about Billing Codes, Phases, and the Default Value “1” as used on the Job Estimates Cost and Income Tabs.

Summary

Billing Codes are used with both Progress Billing (AIA) and T&M Billings, which are two of the setup options for Billing Code on the Jobs General Tab.

Progress Billing (AIA) has the special requirement that the Billing Level is set to the Phase.
T&M Billings does not have that requirement, although T & M Jobs also use Billing Codes to group together the Job Estimates, so having a Billing Code is useful.

Detail

The Billing Code is used to group together the Job Estimates. Usually Billing Codes have a one-to-one relationship with Phase, i.e., Phase 01 would be for Billing Code 01, Phase 02 would be for Billing Code 02, etc.

Users also have the option for Jobs set to the Billing Type Progress Billing (AIA) on the Jobs General Tab to use a different value.

Example

When setting up the Income Estimate, you could use Phases 01, 02 and 03. On the AIA Application, you could set up the Billing Codes to be 100, 200 and 300, therefore you could change the Billing Code for Phase 01 to be 100, 02 to be 200, and 03 to be 300. This is a functionality existed within StarBuilder and has been incorporated into eFinancials and Job Cost.

This is why, if there is no Phase set up for the Job, i.e., the Cost Breakdown or Billing Level as selected on the setup Jobs General Tab is Job only, then the value of "1" defaults into this field, and why you need to be able to edit this field.

To put it another way, when the Job has the Billing Level set to Job, there are no Phases and therefore would be no Phase to default into the Billing Code field from the Billing Level. The default value of “1” was added to ensure there is always a Billing Code assigned.

This is because, for AIA jobs, the Billing Level is required to be set to Phase.
For T&M Jobs, this is not required, although T & M Jobs also use Billing Codes to group together the Job Estimates.