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Administrator Guide
Last Updated: 2025-09-19
Concept: Project Billing

Concept: Project Billing

Project Billing uses information from customer contracts and Workday Projects to create a comprehensive billing process for billable projects.

Project Rate Sheets

Workday enables you to configure multidimensional project rate sheets to:
  • Bill your customers against projects.
  • Define the project pricing dimension using rate categories.
  • Create project price lists for multiple projects.
  • Base project price lists on rate categories such as daily or hourly rates, customer size, or project type.
You can use the project rate sheet to configure the contract rates.

Billing Rate Rules

Workday enables you to create standard billing rate rules to give you more control of your billing rates for time and expense billable projects.

Standard Billing Rate Sheets

Workday enables you to create rule and worker-based standard billing rate sheets to apply billing rates across multiple contracts for your projects. You can create a rate sheet for each currency you need to bill in using these tasks:
  • Maintain Standard Billing Rates by Rules
  • Maintain Standard Billing Rates by Worker

Workday Time Tracking and Project Billing

Workday integrates projects, time tracking, and project billing so you can configure and manage the billing of your projects. These roles are responsible for the process:
  • Time Tracking Administrators configure project time entry in Workday Time Tracking as a one-time task.
  • Workers enter time blocks in Time Tracking and associate them with a project task.
  • Contract Administrators create customer contracts, billing schedules, and contract rate sheets with billing rate rules.
  • Project Managers approve or deny time blocks.
  • Billing Specialists:
    • Edit and recalculate rates.
    • Generate and print invoices for customers.
    • Review and approve or reject billable transactions.
  • Customer Collections Specialists track and manage customer invoices.

Time Block Adjustments

You can adjust your time blocks until you invoice your customer. That is, when a transaction's billing status changes to Billed or Billing In Progress, you can no longer edit the time block. To make changes after you invoice your customers or recognize revenue, you must delete and re-enter your time blocks. When a manager approves a timesheet with a deleted time block, Workday reverses the original time block from the billable transaction. Reversal transactions also include any billing rate rule offsets.

Billable Transaction Worktag Derivation Logic

Workday provides a hierarchy for derivation rules for all of your transaction types. These rules help you reconcile and identify the resulting worktags on billable transaction invoices and revenue accounting.
Transaction Types
Worktag Derivation Logic Rules
Ad hoc Expense
Ad hoc Miscellaneous Expense
Ad hoc Time
Expense
Time Block
Workday applies:
  1. Source worktags.
  2. Derivation rules for worktags not already included. Worker worktags are based on effective date, while Project worktags are based on current moment.
  3. Contract line worktags for worktags not on source or derivation rules.
Ad hoc Supplier Invoice
Miscellaneous Expenses
Supplier Invoice
Workday applies:
  1. Source worktags.
  2. Derivation rules for worktags not already included.
Example:
Dimension
Worktags
Worktag derivation rules
Worker: Cost Center
Project: Region
Worker worktags
TSerrano 1/1/2019:
  • Cost Center: 50000 Office of CFO
  • Region: Headquarters Corporate
Change 2/1/2020:
  • Cost Center: 32200 R&D Product Management
  • Region: USA - Southeast US
Project
Cost Center: 36100 - Consulting Service - North America
Region: USA - Northeast US
Contract line
Cost Center: 71200 Field Sales - North America
Region: USA - Central US
Scenario: Time Block on Project for
Worker: TSerrano
Transaction
Date
Worktags
Time Block
1/3/2020
Cost Center: 35000 Program Management
Region: (not entered)
Revenue Accrual
1/3/2020
Cost Center: 35000 Program Management
Region: USA - Northeast US
Customer Invoice
2/1/2020
Cost Center: 32200 R&D Product Management
Region: USA - Northeast US

Milestones

You can create milestones to track the completion of tasks and specify when Workday can process billing and revenue recognition schedules and installments. You can assign multiple milestones to schedules and installments. Workday doesn't process schedules or installments with pending milestones.
You can use these tasks to configure standard milestones:
  • Maintain Date Milestone Types
  • Create Date Milestone
Standard milestones become customer milestones once you add them to a customer. You can view customer milestone details using the
Find Milestones
 report. Customer milestones are unique for each customer and company combination.
Workday supports these milestone types:
  • Billing Schedule First Invoice: Use to initiate revenue recognition once billing has occurred.
  • Date Milestones: Use standard date milestones as the basis for creating customer date milestones.
  • Project Tasks: Mark project tasks as milestones in the project. Use project milestones to control when you bill project transactions and recognize revenue. You can define project milestones for a project phase or for the overall project to determine when transactions are available for billing. You can use project tasks marked as milestones as contract milestones. You can't delete project tasks that are in use on a contract. You can enter estimated and actual completion dates. Once the project task is complete and you enter an end date, billing can occur. Workday uses the end date as the milestone completion date.

Billing Schedules and Installments

You can:
  • Link contract lines that span multiple contracts for the same company and customer to the same billing schedule.
  • Define schedule types so you can classify your schedules. This process simplifies searches, approvals, and reporting.
  • Create installment or transaction billing schedules to manage certain types of contract lines, or consolidated billing schedules to manage installment, transaction, and prepaid contract lines in 1 schedule.
Workday creates installments based on the scheduled start and end dates, which can differ from the contract line start and end dates. You can also configure the invoice date to assign, which can differ from the installment start date.
Workday supports these billing methods for each billing schedule, and you can change methods throughout the life of the schedule:
  • Defined Installment
    : Define the first and last installment amount for each contract line. Workday spreads the remaining amount evenly among the other installments. You can't use this billing method on consolidated billing schedules.
  • Spread Even
    : Define a set number of installments with equal amounts.
  • Custom
    : You control all aspects of the installments.
A billing schedule includes 1 or more installments. Each billing installment:
  • Creates a customer invoice.
  • Becomes an invoice line.
  • Derives attributes from the associated contract line.
Once you generate installments, you can:
  • Manually update individual installments.
  • Regenerate billing installments automatically after changes to contract amounts. This function only applies to
    Spread Even
     billing methods or
    Spread Even
     and
    Number of Days
     revenue recognition methods.
  • Update your schedules automatically when you make changes to your contract lines.
  • Edit all installments at once when you have a custom schedule.
Workday assigns an
Out of Balance
 status when:
  • You don't schedule your contract line installments exactly.
  • A custom schedule overbills.
You can create customer invoices from billing installments after you approve the billing schedule.

Create Customer Invoices from Billing Installments

With the
Create Customer Invoices from Billing Installments
 task, you can run this task as needed or as a scheduled process. This task enables you to:
  • Select available billing installments to invoice.
  • Mark invoices to submit for automatic approval.
You can:
  • Make limited changes to the customer invoice and add more lines.
  • Create invoices that reference contract lines when you have invoice adjustments.
Workday reflects any changes to invoice line amounts on the billing installment. The contract line billed amount reflects all approved invoices.