Billing Recurring Products

Recurring products are repetitive. For recurring products, the API creates a cascade of billing schedule records depending on the term and billing frequency per the order line item.

Recurring orders can originate from various sources, like Conga CPQ, CLM, or eternal systems. Apart from this, the existing CPQ customers can create recurring ALIs. Irrespective of their origin, recurring OLIs or ALIs are billed more or less in the same way. Conga Billing provides you the flexibility to select the pricing source as OLI or ALI. Based on the pricing source chosen in the Billing Settings, the pricing information can be fetched either from the OLI or ALI. If the pricing source is ALI, during the creation of the BH, Billing fetches the pricing information from the ALI and the remaining data from the OLI. For more details, see Managing Pricing Source.

For more on how Billing works on the Conga Platform, see  Understanding the Billing Architecture on Conga Platform.

Prerequisites

• An order line item is created for a recurring product.

• The order line item is active.
  

• If the Price Source is set to Asset Line Item in the Billing Setting, the ALI must be Active and associated with an active OLI.

When the Pricing Source is Order Line Items

When the pricing source is set to Order Line Item in the Billing Settings, the pricing fields on the Billing Header are fetched directly from the OLI.

Initiating the Billing

When you call the Initiate Billing API for a recurring order line item with OrderLineItemIds and ReadyForBillingDate as the payload, it starts processing the OLI. It creates one billing header, a cascade of billing schedule records, and billing schedule details depending on the term and billing frequency of the order line item. The billing schedule records are created with "Pending Billing" status and displays the following information:

• Bill To
• Period Start Date
• Period End Date
• Actual Fee Amount
• Ready for Invoice Date

This API is capable of handling several order line items and hence can process several line items in bulk.

Let's process a recurring product with the help of the following example.

Example

Suppose you have configured a recurring order line item with the following details:

Contact your admin will make this functionality available in your application so that upon clicking a button you should be able to call the billing service API and get the result as shown. The API creates one Billing Header, 12 Billing Schedule Records, and 12 Billing Schedule Details.

The billing header uses the information from the order line item and contains the following data. Depending upon the information given for the pricing source, It will pick up the pricing information from the order line item or the asset line item. The Billing Header shows:

Twelve Billing Schedule Records are generated showing the following output:

The Actual Fee Amount shown in the billing schedule record is the amount that is billed to the customer. 

Billing Schedule Details show the following information:

When the Pricing Source is Asset Line Items

Recurring ALIs are billed in the same way as recurring OLIs. You must create an ALI that has sufficient data to populate the fields on the Billing Header (BH). During the creation of the BH, Billing fetches the pricing information from the ALI and the remaining data from the OLI.

Initiating the Billing

When you call the Initiate Billing API for this recurring OLI with AssetLineItemIds and ReadyForBillingDate as parameters, in the payload information, the system creates BH, BSRs, and BSDs. Although the BH looks similar to what is created for a regular OLI, some of the field values are fetched from the ALI. The following fields are sourced from the ALI:

Consider the example:

A CPQ service has an asset TCV of USD 2,400.00.  The contract start date and end dates are 01-January-2024 and 31-December-2024. Other details of the CPQ ALI are as follows:

You have initiated the billing for the OLI. Since the Price Type field is populated as One-Time, the system generates only one BH, one BSR, and one BSD. 

The BH shows the following data:

Twelve Billing Schedule Records and Billing Schedule Details are generated.

When you invoice the BSRs, the Total Invoiced Amount and Pending Invoice Amount fields are updated with the rolled-up amount from the BSDs.