Support Hours Billing / Free support hours as part of their subscription.

MemNet provides functionality for the tracking and billing of support that you provide to your members. Please contact us if you are interested in this functionality so it can be activated.

The Support hours Billing feature in MemNet is a billing feature that is integrated with the:

• collection of Contact records that indicate they are billable
• an accrued number of free support hours that are calculated based on the period of time a member has held a valid subscription record (a level of membership).

It allows you to manage a member’s accrued entitlement to free support over a number of years and to bill for excess use at an hourly rate. Other components of the Support Hours Billing module are:

• Member Contact History – recording of support activities
• The display of remaining available hours of free support on the member profile. 
• Contact categories in Type administration - against which a Product is recorded that determines the hourly charge out rate for a specific support activity
• Support Hours in Administration / System Configuration – recording of support hour entitlements per subscription/frequency
• Administration / System Configuration / Company Settings / Accounting – where the start date of the accrual of entitlements starts and the default charge out product is recorded
• invoice generation screen at Administration  / Accounting / Support Hours Billing
• Overnight processing to recalculate a member’s entitlement.

Setting up Support Hours Billing.

There are several steps to set up support hours billing: 

1. Product(s) need to be added to MemNet used for the billing of hours of support beyond any included in the member's subscription. This article described how to set up products in MemNet.
2. Within Type Administration select the product to be used for invoicing billable support of each type. This article explains type administration.
3. Under Administration / System Configuration / Support Hours set the number of hours of free support included for each of your membership subscription types. The start and end date can be used to determine when that number of hours are assigned and can be used if the number of hours differs year on year. 
4. Under Administration / System Configuration / Company Settings / Accounting you need to set up a default billing product (used if you set a contact as billable and its type does not have a product assigned as in 2 above, this can be used if all types use the same product) and a rollover start date that is used to control how far into the past the members available free support is rolled forward to their current availability.

Ongoing usage of support hours billing.

When recording a contact record the user will need to record the time used and if the activity is billable, not billable or not determined (Allows the billable status to be determined later).

Periodically the person responsible for invoicing will go to Administration  / Accounting / Support Hours Billing

The purpose of this screen is to allow a person responsible for periodic billing to review and invoice the excess support time provided. It will list the members who have ‘billable’ activities and will provide links to those activities to allow an invoice to be created for that billable work.

As there are many factors that determine the amount of free support available to a member (such as, changes in subscription, added contacts, contacts changed to/from being billable) we do not maintain this figure in real time but update it as part of an overnight process. There is a button on the contacts page of each member to update that members free support hour and a button on this page to update every member's free support hours if required.

The screen allows you to filter by:

• Contacts (activities) that qualify for Invoicing – this is the default
• Contacts that have been set as Undefined and need to be reviewed to see if they qualify as ‘billable’
• Specific Member
• All of the above

The results will list the members that qualify for the search and will display the member name along with hours already invoiced, hours not determined and the accumulated hours balance the member has.

By clicking on the member you will be taken to the member contact screen and the options will be available to amend or generate an invoice for the Contact record.