Applies to: Project operations Lite deployment – transaction for pro forma billing

Continuing from the first post, here. We talked about Project Contract Types but now we will look at how we setup things in a way to choose which tasks we wish to assign to each specific Quote Line and or Contract Line!

Note: In Quotes we have Quote Lines and in Project Contracts we have Project Contract Lines. These ‘lines’ work exactly the same, so once you close a Quote as Won, it will carry over the same information and create equal Project Contract Lines.

Project Operations was built to allow a certain flexibility when it comes to setting the Project Contract Lines & Details, so you don’t need to create a sub-project just to invoice a portion of the project as T&M, Fixed price, or a flat fee. Also, the idea was to have resources (staff) only see tasks that they have been assigned to and not everything.

We can see from the image below that we can link one project to different Quote and Contract Lines or two different projects to that same Project Contract but different ‘Lines’:

I will provide the steps for Option B since they are similar (instead of picking a second set of tasks from the same project simply choose a different project altogether):

Step one: Create a Project for estimation purposes, with all the tasks and assigned to Generic Resources (these have a costs and sales price set):

Note: By creating header tasks, like Phase One and Phase 2, we lump together all tasks for that phase and that makes it easier to ‘select’ them for every Quote Line/Project Contract Line later. Make sure that after you create Phase 2, that it is not dependend on Phase One or this example would not work.

Step two: Create a Quote.

Step Three: Create a Quote Line (empty for now) but associate it with the project in question, note that I picked Fixed Price as my billing method and for the field Included Tasks choose Selected project tasks only:

Step four: Back inside the project, navigate to Task Billing Setup tab, click on + Associate a Quote line under task associations, and this pop up will appear. In it, select the Phase One ‘header’ task and for Include all child tasks choose Yes. This will only work if you set your tasks with dependencies as seen in step one:

Step five: Inside the Quote Line click on Import from Project Estimation:

We can do the same for Phase two and say maybe choose T&M instead of Fixed price for a contract type. Both are under the same ‘Contract’ but we are tracking them separately. As far as the WBS is concerned, it is one project to manage (Option B that is), but under Quote & Project Contract the setup is different to accomodate portions of the project that are billed differently.

Official documentation from Microsoft: here

I will see you next time, when we explore more on this topic!

Thanks!