What is a Business Unit and Billing Unit?
- Business Unit
A Business Unit is a group of users with similar practice areas or serving a specific industry. - Billing Unit
A Billing Unit is an entity that contains revenue and costs. This is where invoices are billed to. This is typically the office headquarters in your city.
You can set up your law-firms Business and Billing Units inside the Control Panel, under the Organisation section and clicking Manage Business & Billing Units.
Clicking Manage Business & Bulling Units will look something as below.
Figure 1 - LEX247 Consulting's Business and Billing Units as seen in the Control Panel.
From here, you can add a Business Unit and a Billing Unit.
As an example, the organizational structure of LEX247 Consulting business and billing units is as follows.
Figure 2 - LEX247 Consulting's organizational hierarchy chart.
The chart above is missing IT & Telecommunications and Property (as seen in Figure 1) as Business Units below the LEX247 Consulting ALBQ (Billing Unit).
In the example provided above, you will need to understand the following terms.
- Top Business Unit
Is the highest level business unit where all business units report to in the organizational hierarchy. - Parent Business Unit
Is a business unit with one or more business units that report to it in the hierarchy. - Child Business Unit
Is a business unit that is immediately under another business unit in the hierarchy.
From the chart above, you can see that LEX247 Consulting is the Top Business Unit that isn't defined as a Billing Unit; it can be if you wish it to be.
Below LEX247 Consulting both LEX247 Consulting ALBQ and LEX247 Consulting HOU are both Billing Units. These two are Child Business Units to LEX247 Consulting (Parent Business Unit).
However, both LEX247 Consulting ALBQ and LEX247 Consulting HOU are also Parent Business Units to Consulting Services, Corporate Law, Criminal Law, Family Services, and Financial Services; who are all Child Business Units.
To note everything simply.
- LEX247 Consulting is the Top Business Unit.
- LEX247 Consulting HOU is a Billing Unit.
- That has the Parent Business Unit as LEX247 Consulting.
- That has no Child Business Units of its own.
- LEX247 Consulting ALBQ is a Billing Unit.
- That has the Parent Business Unit as LEX247 Consulting.
- That has the following business units as its Child Business Units.
- Each Business Unit below has LEX247 Consulting ALBQ set as the Parent Business Unit.
- Consulting Services
- Corporate Law
- Criminal Law
- Family Services
- Financial Services
- Each Business Unit below has LEX247 Consulting ALBQ set as the Parent Business Unit.
It is important to setup your billing and business units correctly. When adding and editing Users, you will be giving access to these users to certain business units.
For example, if we provided access to a new User to the Business Unit LEX247 Consulting, since this is a Top Business Unit, the User will gain access to all Child Business Units as well.
For more information about how to Add a Business Unit, click here.
For more information on how to Add a Billing Unit, click here.
Note:
Ensure that you are a User with 'Administrator'-rights set to be able to access the Control Panel.