Billing the One Time Legacy Assets

For the legacy “One Time” asset line items (ALI), Conga Billing assumes two possibilities:

• The ALI must have been invoiced in the legacy system and hence nothing remains to be billed in Conga Billing.
  or
• It is not been billed in the legacy system hence Conga Billing bills it for its full amount.

Prerequisites

• The custom setting Creation of legacy BS record is set to a Single Record value.
• The object and fields required to support legacy billing for legacy asset line items are configured. For more information, see Understanding Billing Schedules and Billing System Properties.
• The following minimum criteria are met: 
  • The Is Legacy for Billing checkbox is set to True.
  • The Price Type is set to One Time.
  • The Billing Frequency is set to One Time.
  • The First Billing Date is "not blank" and is greater than the ALI start date.
• The Original Start Date, Start Date, End Date, Remaining Billable Amount, TCV, Selling Term, and CPQ Pricing fields (Base Unit Price and Net Price) are captured accurately on the asset line record.
• The asset is defined as per the guidelines given for “One Time” products which imply that the Price Type, Selling Frequency, Pricing Frequency, and Billing Frequency do not be in conflict.

• As per the definition, the ALI should’ve been either invoiced for the full amount in the legacy system or not billed at all. Partial invoicing is not supported by Conga Billing for one-time products.
• The ALI is not renewed.

To bill one-time legacy asset

1. Define an asset as per the guidelines given for One-Time products by CPQ. For more information, see Recommendations to Import Legacy Products into Conga CPQ.

2. Perform the CPQ flow to generate Asset Line Item, Order, and Order Line Item.

   

   Disable all functionalities associated with auto-activating the order in your org.

3. Make sure that the below data points are populated in the asset line item record.
   
   • Remaining Billable Amount.
   • Is Legacy for Billing?
   • First Billing Date.
4. Activate the order manually. If the Initiate Billing on Order Activation custom setting is set to True, you must initiate billing by populating the Ready for Billing Date field on the corresponding order line item or order.
5. Conga Billing creates only one billing schedule with different statuses (Informational or Contracted), depending on whether the asset line item is billed in the legacy system or not.

Example

1. Asset already billed in the legacy system: Suppose you are a billing administrator of a company selling computer hardware and you have already invoiced the customer in the legacy system. The legacy in Conga should have details as mentioned below. The remaining billable amount should be 0.00 for this ALI.

Since the asset is already billed in the legacy system, Conga Billing creates one billing schedule with the Type as Informational and assigns the Status as Invoiced:

2. Asset not billed in the legacy system: Suppose you are a billing administrator of a company selling computer hardware and you have not invoiced the customer in the legacy system. The legacy in Conga should have details as mentioned below. The “Remaining Billable Amount” should be equivalent to the ALI’s TCV (since it has not been invoiced yet).

Since the asset is not billed in the legacy system, Conga Billing creates one billing schedule with the Type as Contracted and assigns the Status as Pending Billing:

By generating the schedules in either of the above methods, Conga Billing creates the billing schedules in accordance with the definition of the product.

Amending one-time legacy assets 

It’s possible that “One Time” products can be subjected to the amendment operations such as “Change” or “Cancel” in Conga. Although Billing allows you to perform amendments on one-time 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.

The “One Time” products are not renewable, so Conga Billing assumes that you don’t renew such ALIs in Conga and hence there’s no functionality given.

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

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

• 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.
• The following minimum criteria are met: 
  • The Is Legacy for Billing checkbox is set to True.
  • The Price Type is set to One Time.
  • The Billing Frequency is set to One Time.
  • The First Billing Date is "not blank" and is greater than the ALI start date.
  • ABO operation to be performed on the CPQ is “Change” (“Change:Quantity” or “Change:Configuration” or any similar functions that CPQ might release in the future are not supported).
  • The amendment date should be greater than or equal to the "First Billing Date".

To amend one-time legacy asset

1. Bill a one-time legacy asset. For more information, see To Bill one-time legacy asset.

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 the amendment of one-time 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,

• Billing processes the request and creates a new schedule with an amount equivalent to the delta/refund else it throws an error on the Order page.
• Updates Remaining Billable Amount on the asset line item.

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

Let’s use the example from the previous section where the ALI is fully invoiced in the legacy system. 

Since the asset is already billed in the legacy system, Billing creates one billing schedule as the Type as Informational and Status as Invoiced as shown:

Say, you’ve performed an amendment to this ALI to go into effect from 7/20/2023 (which is beyond the “First Billing Date”.) As a part of the “Change,” you’ve increased the price in such a way that the total TCV increased from $5,400.00 to $6,000.00 resulting in a delta amount of $600.00.

When the ALI change goes into effect, Conga Billing will create a new schedule reflecting the delta amount as the billable amount to your customer. The resulting billing schedules are as follows:

The Remaining Billable amount will be updated to $600.00.