How to handle third party billing

This article will explain in detail how to handle third party billing within ESC. The purpose of third party billing is to charge fees to a company like a warranty company for services rendered on behalf of a customer.

ESC will allow you to bill out the warranty company but send service history to the actual customer for whom the service was provided.

Procedure:

1. First, you will need to create the manufacturer/vendor/landowner/warranty company as an actual customer in ESC. For the purposes of this procedure, we will call this the warranty company.
2. Next, create a Job for the warranty company customer but name the job after the customer for whom you are performing the work. (For example, create a job called Joe Smith under the Warranty company.) To create the job, go to Customer Info → Setup Jobs and select the warranty company and name the job after the service customer.
3. Now create a dispatch for the customer that requires the actual service. If this customer does not exist, it will need to be created but it should have it's own customer number and not be setup as a location of the warranty company. During the creation of this dispatch, be sure to type in the name of the warranty company's job that was just created in Step 2 within the Job field of the dispatch. (Note: You will not be able to search for the job here because this field is designed to look for jobs that are associated to the current customer) When the work is finished, complete the dispatch.
4. In the final steps, we need to invoice out the completed dispatch so that we can bill out the warranty company for services rendered:
1. Go to Sales → Sales Invoicing.
2. Open the Add New menu and select Create from Dispatch. 
3. Select the completed customer dispatch that has the job for the warranty company.
4. Assign an invoice number if needed and you will notice that the billing address on the invoice is for the warranty company and that the shipping address is for the actual customer where the work was done. You can change this shipping address if you like, or leave it as a way to know which customer this invoice was in relation to.
5. Save the invoice after adding the appropriate parts, billing codes etc.
6. If you go to Dispatch → Qualification, when you search for the customer that the work was done for, you should see history on the History tab for the work that was just performed and added to the sales invoice.

Additional Information:

It is not necessary to delete the job that was created under the warranty company. It is recommended to keep it available in the event that additional third party billing services are rendered for this same customers.