Billing Preferences

As a billing system admin, you have to perform the following configurations- for different accounts, generate bills on different days of the month (1st of the month for one account, 15th of the month for other accounts, and so forth). For some accounts, the invoices should be generated in a pdf format and for some, in a word format. Few accounts want the bills to be generated every month and the rest every quarter.

Each of these requirements apparently involves different configurations at account level- making this a tedious task. The best approach would be to group all these settings under one roof and apply them in one go. Billing Preferences does all this; it is a container that holds many key settings that are necessary to drive your Billing. You can feed in your choices for various fields in the Billing Preference and then associate Billing Preferences to an entire Org, Account or a Quote/Proposal or Quote/Proposal Line. You can use this functionality to define each customer's billing preference to suit their requirements and convenience.

Billing Preferences drive the alignment of Billing Schedules. Later if you want to make any changes to the preference, you can update the Billing Preference through an asset-based order.

You can create several billing preferences for one customer and set each preference at a different level. The Billing Preference that you define, determines the 

• Billing Date and Month,
• Billing frequency,
• Applicable Taxes, and
• Method and format of Invoice delivery.

With this feature, you can select a preference for every new invoice that you generate for that customer. If you do not select a Billing Preference, a default preference is applied when you generate an invoice. You can generate an Invoice for an account even if the Billing Preference you select is inactive. You must activate only one Billing Preference at a time.

Creating a Billing Preference

For information on creating a billing preference, see Setup Billing Preference.

Associating Billing Preferences

One way of associating Billing Preferences to Accounts, Quote or Orders is by setting the Preference Level at the line level. You can also associate a Billing Preference to an Account or a Proposal header from the Billing Preference Lookup () field.

The lowest level billing preference will take precedence. Also making changes to a Billing Preference will only affect future orders. 

Billing Schedules

If the Expected Start Date on Quote/Proposal is ‘1/20/2016’ and Billing Cycle Start is set to Billing Day of the Month (10th of the month), the Billing Schedules will be:

And so on.
You have the flexibility to choose Billing Day from other objects such as Account, Quote/Proposal, and Order. Please see the other values for Billing Cycle Start in the above table.

Note

To generate Billing Schedules, you must provide Expected Start Date and Expected End Date on the Quote/Proposal page.

Let us take a look at how Billing Schedules are aligned for 3 different products based on the Billing Rule and Bill Cycle Start Date.

Example 1

List Price of the product Ace is $100.

For Billing Rule set to Arrears, Ready for Invoice Date is a day after the Period End Date. Billing Schedules for Ace will be,

If you set Ready For Invoice Date Offset as 10, Ready for Invoice Date will be,

Example 2

List Price of the product DigiX is $200.

For Billing Rule set to Advance, Ready for Invoice Date is the Period Start Date for a schedule. Billing Schedules for DigiX if Ready for Billing Date is 1/9/2016,

Example 3

List Price of the product MyShot is $300. 

For Billing Rule set to Bill on Ready for Billing Date, Ready for Invoice Date takes the value of Ready for Billing Date on the Quote/Proposal for all schedules. Billing Schedules for MyShot, if the Order Date is 1/15/2015,

To see the impact Proration has on Billing Schedules, please refer Proration.

Impact of Calendar Cycle Start on Billing Schedules

Calendar Cycle Start is used to align the Billing Schedules to a defined calendar month. For example, Billing Frequency is Quarterly and Calendar Cycle Start is None.

The Billing Cyle start is 4/1/2016, so the Billing Schedules will align on the Start Day and first Quarter will be 4/1 to 7/31.

If Calendar Cyle Start is set to June 

The Billing Schedule for the first period will be 4/16 to 5/31. After this, quarters will align with 6/1 (June) and hence the period will be 6/1 to 8/31.

Note

Billing Schedule alignment based on Calendar Cycle Start is applicable only for Products with Billing Frequency set to Quarterly, Half-yearly, and Yearly.