Consolidated Billing / Imported Billing Feature

Create a single invoice for usage & service lines in contract with different invoicing rules for usage and service lines

Take an example of contracts with service and usage lines. We want to bill customer in advance for service & on actual usage for usage lines at the end of the month (i.e. Arrears invoicing rule). 

When such contract is billed with "Service Contracts Main Billing" Program, it creates two different invoices, one for service lines & one for usage lines as usage & services lines have different invoicing rules & one invoice can only have one invoicing rule.

Now, as we want to send customer only one invoice for this contract, we need to consolidate or group this two invoices into one invoice.

As the intention is to group some invoices, the imported billing feature of receivables can be used. Use following procedure to group the invoices:-

1.     Run "Service Contracts Main Billing" Program.

2.     Once above program is over, data will be populated in the RA_INTERFACE_LINES_ALL tables.

3.     For the contract number, populate "cons_billing_number" column in this interface table.

4.     Run "Auto Invoice" program.

5.     Auto Invoice Program will populate data in following tables:

     a.  ar_cons_inv_al………….This is header table which stores the Cons_Billing_Number.

     b.  ar_cons_inv_trx_all……This is lines table and it provides information about all the transactions

……………………………………………..assigned to one billing number.

6.     Create a customized invoice print program.

Note: All transactions belonging to one bill number can be easily extracted with the help of these tables for printing.

Please take note of following before using imported billing functionality:

In order to use this feature, in the Customer Profiles the Consolidated Billing Formats should be enabled and type should be selected as Imported and when the data comes to RA Interface table, populate the cons_billing_number and run the Auto Invoice Program. The Transactions belonging to the same bill to site can share a same billing number; else the Auto invoice program will reject all the records populated with same Cons_Billing _Number. Transactions belonging to different bill to sites cannot be clubbed under one Cons_Billing_Number.

The Lockbox program is currently not able to handle the Consolidated billing efficiently, the customer cannot pay for one Consolidated billing invoice number, he has to pay amount due for all CBI numbers and in case if he the amount paid by customer is less than the sum of all overdue Consolidated billing invoices, then the receipt will be imported as unapplied receipt and application should be done manually. (There is an enhancement request raised from other customers to allow lockbox to apply receipts to invoices grouped by Consolidated billing number).

To solve the above lockbox issue, we can derive related invoices on the basis of consolidated invoice number given by bank & application can be done based on this invoices.

The Transaction form will show the billing number in Transactions and Receipts, if Show Billing number is checked in System options setup.