Understanding Billing Documents
Billing Documents are the records you create in Billing as a Service to move a deal from quote to payment. There are three types: Quotation, Sales Order, and Sales Invoice. Together they cover the full sales cycle inside Microsoft Teams, so you quote, confirm, and bill from one place without re-entering customer details.
Every document you create counts toward your monthly Billing Documents quota, which is why the quota is measured in Billing Documents rather than per type. Your plan sets how many you can create each month.
The Three Document Types
Billing as a Service gives you three document types, each covering one stage of the sales cycle:
Quotation: the priced offer you send to a customer before they commit.
Sales Order: the confirmed order once the customer accepts, used to track what is to be delivered and billed.
Sales Invoice: the request for payment you issue for goods or services delivered.
All three share the same building blocks: catalog items (products or services you save once and reuse), discounts on each line or on the whole document, and your configured tax rules. This keeps pricing consistent as a deal moves from one document to the next.
How the Documents Relate
The three documents form a chain that mirrors how a sale progresses: Quotation to Sales Order to Sales Invoice. You can follow the full chain or skip stages, depending on how the deal runs.
Here is how the links work:
A Quotation can convert to one or more Sales Orders. Line items and customer details carry over automatically.
A Sales Order can generate one or more Sales Invoices, so you can bill a single order in stages or split it across several invoices.
A Quotation can also link directly to a Sales Invoice when you do not need a Sales Order in between.
Each document is optional at the start. You can create a standalone Sales Invoice with no Quotation or Sales Order behind it, which suits quick, one-off billing. The chain is there when you want traceability from quote to payment, not a requirement.
Every Document Carries a Customer
Each Billing Document is tied to the customer it belongs to, recorded in two parts:
Organization: the company you are billing. Every document carries one, and it supplies the company and tax details that appear on the document.
Contact: the specific person at that organization. This is optional, so you can add a named contact when you have one or leave it off when you do not.
Separately, your Billing Entity is the legal organizations issuing the bill, holding your company name, address, logo, and contact details. You set it up once, and it appears as the Bill From information on every Quotation, Sales Order, and Invoice. For the steps, see how to add a new Billing Entity.
Connecting a Billing Document to a CRM Opportunity
When you use Billing as a Service alongside CRM as a Service, any Billing Document can link to the CRM Opportunity that started the deal. Each document links to at most one Opportunity, while one Opportunity can gather many documents, giving you a single Associated view of every Quotation, Sales Order, and Invoice tied to a deal.
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