New Features

The following features are new to Conga Billing on Conga Platform in this release.

Creating a Plan Template and Custom Plan

You can create a custom plan to customize the billing for the line items (CPQ cart lines) or Order Line Items (OLIs). To minimize the data entry, you or your sales reps can use a "Plan Template". You must create and activate the template by calling respective APIs before using it. When the plan is created using its API, the template ID must be used as an input parameter so that the plan has all the line item information based on the template. When the OLIs are initiated for billing, the billing schedule records are created as per the plan information.

Supporting Evergreen Billing

Billing on the Conga Platform now supports billing of evergreen order lines. It enables you to mark the billing header as Evergreen (instead of keeping it "Recurring") and auto-creation of additional billing schedule records (BSRs) when the existing or older BSRs are marked as Invoiced (using API or other out-of-the-box supported methods).

Supporting Full term cancellation

Billing now enables you to fully cancel the subscription of a one-time, recurring, or evergreen product when the billing schedule records (BSR) are either invoiced or not invoiced.

Enabling Renewal of Billing

Billing enables you to renew the billing of a product. Renewal of a product or service is a common and effective way to extend its subscription. During the renewal of a product or service, new billing schedule records (BSRs) are created for the renewal period as indicated on the OLI. If any schedules are still in pending status from the previous sale, they remain as is and are not impacted by the renewal process.

Marking Billing Header as contracted

Billing enables an enterprise to generate Billing Schedule Records (BSRs) for bundles and nested bundles as a part of their product offering and configuration. However, when invoicing is initiated for these bundled products, ambiguity arises on how these bundles are getting invoiced. To remove this ambiguity, billing allows you to mark the billing header as contracted so that when invoicing is initiated, all the BSRs under a contracted billing header are picked for invoicing.

Split Billing

Billing now enables you to split the billing schedule records (BSRs) to accommodate the customer's request to adjust the billing amount of a particular billing period into smaller payments. The split of the BSRs is driven by the calendar date but the fee amount can be split either by amount or percentage, using a setting. The number of splits, split method, split date, and split amount or split percentage are the required values you must enter for the successful execution of the process. At the end of the process, the original BSR is split and marked as superseded. The sum of the actual fee amounts of new BSRs is equal to the actual fee amount of the original BSR. The new BSRs have a status of pending billing.

Ability to Split and Distribute the Billing Amount

If you have a customer request to partially defer the payment of a billing period to another period, you can use the Split and Distribute feature. While the Split part works identically to the Split Billing feature, the Distribute part helps to auto-defer to other non-invoiced billing periods. The fee amount is distributed to the next schedule, or last schedule, or spread evenly across the remaining periods based on the distribution method selected at the billing preference level.

The Split Distribution Method must be set to an appropriate value at the Billing Preference level to enable this functionality.

Adjusting Billing Amount Through Ad Hoc Entries

It is now possible to adjust the billing amount for a specific period through one or more manual entries. Billing creates new billing schedule details (BSDs) of the adjustment category inside the billing schedule records (BSRs) to implement this functionality. When these BSDs are approved, the fee amount is rolled up to the BSRs and subsequently to the billing header, which shows this amount under the Total Adjusted Amount field. This functionality is supported for BSDs and BSRs of one or more billing headers.

To enable this feature, set the Allow Adjustments in Billing setting to True.

Updating the Status of Billing Schedule Records

When the status of a BSR is changed from Pending Billing to Invoiced, the Total Invoiced Amount field on the BH shows the cumulative rolled-up amounts of all the BSRs in Invoiced status. The Pending Invoiced Amount field on the BH contains the total contract value less the invoiced amount.