Amending the Usage Legacy Assets

It’s possible that usage-based products can be subjected to the amendment operations such as “Change” or “Cancel” in Conga. Although Billing allows you to perform amendments on usage-based legacy assets, it imposes some timeline restrictions which are as follows:

• You can perform the said amendment operations either on the “Start Date” of the ALI, or from the “First Billing Date” onwards.
• If you attempt to amend the asset line item between the “Original Start Date” and the “First Billing Date”, the system does not accept it.
• If you want to debit or credit some amount to a customer "between the Start Date and First Billing Date”, you need to do it manually.

You must not change the First Billing Date manually or through the database updates for subsequent operations. If you do so, it results in serious data corruption which may impact the billing data integrity.

Prerequisites

• Ensure that the custom setting Creation of legacy BS record is set to Single Record value.

• Ensure that the object and fields required to support legacy billing for legacy asset line items (ALI) are configured. For more information, see Understanding Billing Schedules and Billing System Properties.
• Minimum criteria to amend usage-based legacy assets in Conga: 
  • Is Legacy for Billing checkbox is set to True.
  • The Price Type is set to Usage.
  • The Remaining Billable Amount is USD 0.00.
  • The First Billing Date is "not blank" and is greater than the ALI start date.
  • The amendment date should be greater than or equal to the "First Billing Date".

Key points to consider

• The Change:Quantity and Change:Configuration functionalities are not supported for the amendment of recurring legacy assets. If you attempt to perform any of these functions, they tend to cancel the ongoing amendment process and create a new asset line item. This new asset line item is not treated as a legacy asset by the system and hence it goes out of the scope of this functionality.
• For the usage-based billing of the legacy assets, the usage quantity is not pre-determined, rather it is derived from the Usage Inputs.
•  In simpler words, you can say that Billing supports only the postpaid type of usage-based consumption.
• The usage rating determines the billable amount and the system ignores any TCV which is populated for the asset line item. 
• The Remaining Billable Amount is always $0.00.

• The custom setting “Creation of legacy BS record” is set to a “Single Record” value.

To amend usage-based legacy assets

1. Bill an usage-based legacy asset. For more information, see Billing the Usage Legacy Assets.

2. Navigate to the Installed Products page and click Change on the CPQ Cart or explicitly call the API to perform an amendment on the legacy asset. 

   
   

   

   The Change:Quantity and Change:Configuration functionalities are not supported for amendment of Usage-Based legacy assets. If you attempt to perform any of these functions, they tend to cancel the ongoing amendment process and create a new asset line item. This new asset line item is not treated as a legacy asset by the system and hence it goes out of the scope of this functionality. 

At the time of initiating Billing for the “Change” scenario, Conga Billing Engine verifies if the new Start Date is on or after the First Start Date or not.

Similarly, for a “Cancel” operation, the Engine verifies if the “Cancellation Date” is on the “Start Date” or “Start Date-1” depending upon the “Same Day Cancellation” setting.

If the validation is passed, then Conga Billing:

• Processes the request and produces the amended billing schedule even if the Remaining Billable amount is $0.00.
• Sets the various parameters of the Usage Inputs associated with the corresponding billing schedules to "Default Value". If you have provided any discount, the Asset Usage Price Tiers get updated for the same percentage discount.

As of now, CPQ doesn’t stop you from amending an asset if the Change Start Date is in between the current “Start Date” and “First Billing Date.” However, Billing will not work for this scenario.

Until there are out-of-the-box messages available on the CPQ cart, it’s strongly advised by Conga Billing to create self-constraint rules (or have this logic in your callbacks) on the cart to prevent such operations.

This will ensure that the user is stopped at CPQ itself instead of discovering at the Order stage which is too late for that ALI.

Example

As per the above example, let's suppose you want to give a discount of 20% to the customer from the Period Start Date of 11/20/2022. The amended billing schedules, Usage Inputs, and Asset Usage Price Tiers are as follows:

Usage Inputs are set to default value. You can click on the Input ID and process the Usage Input. Once you process the Usage Input, the same will reflect on the corresponding billing schedule.

Asset Usage Price Tiers will show the discounted price.

After doing the amendment the final Billing Schedule looks like this:

Usage Schedules are automatically generated to record the quantity consumed for each Billing Schedule.