Understanding Billing Processes

Article • 4/10/2026 • 3 min read

When you ship goods to a customer, you send an invoice to explain what they owe. If a customer returns goods or overpays, you can issue a credit memo for future purchases. If customers delay their payments, you can add finance charges, send reminder statements, and place them on hold to prevent further orders. The status of invoices and credit memos changes in Made2Manage to reflect where they are in payment.

Explain invoice and credit memo statuses

Applying progress billing to line items

Progress billing allows you to set milestones or billing points during the project, but prior to shipment, when you can bill (Also called statement) A document showing a customer’s credits, debits, and balance for a given period of time. the customer for a portion of the total amount. You can only apply progress billing as long as there is at least one progress billing and one final payment, the sum of which equals 100 percent of the line item Progress billing gives you the ability to not recognize revenue Inflow of assets resulting from sales to customers. until after final billing. You can select from three types of progress billing:

After you select a type, you must create a progress-billing schedule to find when and how much to bill the customer. You can post progress-billing amounts to the unearned revenue account (Also called general ledger account) For instructions, see the Related Information. When you create invoices for progress billing, a separate miscellaneous line item is generated for rounding adjustments to make sure the invoice amount matches the progress-billing amount. This line item will not appear on the actual printed invoice.

Determining when to bill customers for progress billing

Sales orders must be in an open or closed status before you can create invoices for any type of progress billing. For the time and materials and percent complete types, jobs must be completed or canceled to create final progress billing invoices. Since the billing amount for time and materials is based on the actual job costs, it is recommend to print the Progress Detail report before or directly after you create the invoice to track the history of the costs.

How are time and materials billing amounts calculated?

Calculating Billing Amounts:

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