An asset is a resource with economic value that an individual, company, or country owns or controls. In context to Conga Billing, you can define a legacy asset as follows: 

  • The asset line items which are created by the Conga CPQ and Conga CLM products but aren’t getting billed using Conga Billing.
  • The asset line items which are created outside Conga products but aren’t getting billed using Conga Billing.

Conga Billing provides you with a technical framework to bill these legacy assets out of the box so that the implementation can be done with less time, effort, and cost.

The following diagram very closely illustrates the concept of legacy assets and their migration in Conga. Let us assume that an existing CPQ customer has already created some assets and the assets are updated on 7/20/2021 with their configuration and price. On the other hand, let’s assume that an asset is coming to Conga from an external system and the last known change in configuration and pricing happened on 7/20/2021. When billing is initiated for both these assets using Conga Billing, then the engine considers 7/20/21 as the start date for both assets in Conga.

For the period mentioned in the above diagram, let us assume that the net unit price of an asset is $150 and hence the total contract value (TCV) will be $5400 for 36 months. 

The date 11/20/22 shown in the diagram is the First Billing Date for this asset in Conga Billing.

Configuring System Settings

Before you dive into the functionality let us configure some CPQ-related config system settings necessary for the legacy feature to work.

  • Set the Selling Term Calculation Method to Billing Preference.
  • Set the Same Day Cancellation to True, if you want the asset cancellation applicable from the same day.
  • Set Enable Custom Rounding to "True".
  • Set Term Field Precision to 10.
  • On the Billing System Properties page, verify that the setting "Creation of Legacy BS Records" is set to "Single Record".

 Creation of Billing Schedules

 In order to bill the legacy asset line in Conga, Conga Billing must know how much of the asset TCV is yet to be billed and the corresponding leftover term. The managed package introduces some new fields and Conga Billing assumes that you populate the following information on the asset line item record to facilitate the calculation:

  • Remaining Billable Amount.
  • First Billing Date.
  • Is Legacy for Billing checkbox must be set to True.

Once billing is initiated, Conga Billing uses the above fields to invoke its billing logic. Conga Billing assumes that the difference between TCV and the Remaining Billable Amount has been billed and invoiced in the legacy system. Using the First Billing Date on the asset line item, it computes the remainder of the term.

Based on the above logic, Conga Billing produces a cascade of billing schedules with informational and contracted types.

The first record produced is an Informational billing schedule and contains the Fee Amount equal to what has been already billed in some different system hence it is marked as Invoiced.

Before Conga Billing proceeds to generate the actual schedules for invoicing purposes, it checks if the asset line has been billed consistently or not in the legacy system. If the billing is done consistently, subsequent billing schedules are created as per the “recurring” logic that is known today. These schedules are of a Contracted type and their status is Pending Billing.

If the engine determines that the legacy asset is not billed consistently, the engine creates an invoiceable schedule with an amount adjusted in such a way that the sum of the first schedule (informational type) and this new schedule will be equal to what must have been actually billed as on date. With this schedule, the asset will now be enabled to get billed consistently and will have a fee amount in alignment with the asset's net unit price.

The second schedule can be a credit/debit depending upon whether the asset has been overbilled/underbilled in the legacy engine. This schedule must exist and be marked as Invoiced depending on where you want to perform this one-time adjustment to align the legacy Asset Line as per its definition and its Net Unit Price. This record is known as the catch-up schedule. For more details on catchup, refer to Understanding "Catchup" schedule in the Legacy Billing Period.

For more information on how Conga Billing creates billing schedules for different types of products, refer to Managing Legacy Assets.

Restrictions on ABO operations for legacy assets

Although Conga Billing supports all types of billing (recurring, evergreen, custom, usage-based, and one-time billing) to various product categories, there are certain restrictions from the ABO perspective for the legacy assets.

Let's know about the various restrictions that are applicable.

  • You can perform an amendment from the First Billing Date onwards. in the above example, from 11/20/22 or a later date.
  • For doing an amendment on an asset line item you must use the Change functionality, Change:Quantity and Change:Configuration are not supported.
  • You will be able to do any amendment or partial cancellation in Billing from 11/20/22 onwards.
  • If you have enabled the Same Day Cancellation setting in your org, you can perform full cancellation starting from the “Original Start Date” (or one day before), to get a full refund for the legacy period.