When preparing offers or orders on a fixed-price basis, a payment plan is usually also agreed, which specifies the steps in which the offer or order amount is due. Typically, every company already has predefined payment plans that are offered. With foreknown, we now offer a simple way of storing these predefined payment plans once in the system and reusing them for new offers or orders.
In a conversation with a company that is currently evaluating the use of foreknown, the topic of fixed-price offers or orders and the associated creation of payment plans came up. Previously, payment plans always had to be created for each offer or order in the form of individual payment plan entries with specific totals and resubmission dates. In practice, however, standard payment plans were always agreed with customers, which provided a percentage share of payments for certain events such as commissioning, delivery and acceptance of a service. In order to avoid recurring activities when preparing such offers or orders, a solution had to be created.
Manage Payment Plan Templates
The foreknown Release 2.10.2 introduced the so-called payment plan templates. Several payment plans with desired payment entries can be managed as templates via System Administration.
Each payment plan template is given a descriptive name, the desired unit for the payment plan entries, e.g. flat rate, and a tax rate, e.g. 19%. In addition, a template can be defined as the default.
In addition to these global settings, the individual payments must of course be defined. A percentage of the fixed price total is defined for each payment so that the specific amount can be calculated depending on the offer or order total.
Each payment plan entry in the template thus defines the properties that are used for the resulting specific payment plans. These would be the name, a description, the percentage share and a number of days for calculating a resubmission date.
When creating the payment plan entries in the template, the system always displays how much of 100 percent is already covered and what is still missing or has already been distributed too much.
Apply Payment Plan Templates
Once a company has created its payment plan templates, these can be easily applied to new offers or orders. As soon as an offer or order contains items of the type "Fixed price", a list of all predefined templates is offered as a drop-down field in the "Payment Plan" tab and by selecting a template, all payment plan entries calculated from it are generated immediately. The total fixed price amount is distributed to the entries and resubmission dates are determined relative to the offer or order date.
This allows you to create a complete payment plan with just one click.
Conclusion
With foreknown, we want to simplify daily processes such as the creation of fixed-price offers and orders step by step. The creation of payment plan templates and their use in fixed-price offer and orders is just another example of this. Once the templates have been defined, the effort involved in creating payment plans is reduced to a minimum. No amounts have to be calculated manually and the dates for resubmissions is calculated at the same time. This not only makes it faster, but also avoids mistakes.