Custom plans are used when you want a customized billing arrangement. You can create a custom plan when you want to bill a customer over certain periods throughout the year or on achieving a predefined milestone. Custom plans are always created at the order or order line items (OLI) level. Each OLI can have a separate custom plan.
You can create a custom plan template and apply it to a custom plan. The pre-configured custom plan template will auto-fill a custom plan by aligning the schedule and percentage amount for each stage.
Billing on the Conga Platform offers two types of custom plans:
- Milestone custom plan - You can create this plan when the billing for a product is based on the completion of a milestone corresponding to various stages. You can bill your customers as each milestone is successfully reached, either a percentage of the entire cost or a pre-defined amount. This plan can be designed primarily for complex and large, long-term projects.
- Term-based custom plan - It supports creating custom plans for products whose billing is duration specific or the products whose billing is based on contract period. For example, a recurring service like maintenance would require periodic bill generation such as monthly, quarterly, yearly, etc. This plan can be designed primarily for Maintenance, Leasing, or Periodic contracts.
At the time of creation, the custom plan is not active. After validating all the information, the custom plan template is auto-activated by the engine.
The creation or editing of a custom plan is allowed till the order or the OLI is activated. Once an order is activated, you cannot create or update a custom plan.
After the activation of the order or OLI, the billing header (BH) is generated, and the custom plan information gets associated with it. This custom plan information drives the creation of billing schedule details (BSD) and billing schedule records (BSR). The custom plan line items are created as BSDs under a BH. These BSDs show the opted custom plan as a Milestone or Term Based under the Record Type field.
An API is called to complete the milestone lines at the BSD level. After completion, the value in the Actual Fee Amount field is recomputed and the actual date is received from the API. Both these information are rolled up and updated in the Actual Fee Amount and Ready for Invoice Date fields of the corresponding BSR.