Uploading Usage Data

Begin by opening the bill. From SAP Subscription Billing, select the Manage Billing Data App. The Bill Overview page displays several search options for finding a particular bill. After the search, select the bill in question.

The header of this bill displays the following key information:

• Customer and Market
• Billing date: Represents the date of bill completion and invoicing, and can be considered the legal billing date. The bill is automatically closed on the billing date unless it requires manual closing. No further changes are possible to closed bills. 
• Due Date: The date where all charges or credits on the bill are due.
• Billing period.
• Total monetary amount.
• Bill status.
• Split element: This option displays if defined earlier during setup of the subscription (See Bill Split Element.)
• Transfer status and successor document information: Displays if bills are transferred to an integrated system. (The lifecycle of bills will be shared later in this unit.)
• Payment details or SAP S/4HANA contract account.
• Any custom references that are inherited from the customer.

Charges and credits for subscriptions are rated continuously and aggregated into bills. Each bill can contains charges and/or credits for multiple subscriptions. A separate bill item is created for each subscription item. A bill contains a maximum of 100 bill items. After 100 bill items a new bill is created. Bills are only created for active subscriptions with internal billing and commercial subscription types.

Let’s look at a bill before the usage data has been uploaded and processed. The only item charged is the recurring fee.

Now let’s upload the usage data and view a bill with the usage data processed and applied.

Let’s upload usage data via the manage Usage Records app. From the Subscriptions and Billing page, open the Mange Usage Records app. The Manage Usage Records page displays existing Measured Usage Records. Select the Create button. The page defaults to the Header Info tab. Select the Technical Resource Type menu to find your Technical Resource Type from the list. For this scenario, we’ll select Standard Print Group, which represents a service type. Then select your Technical Resource ID. From the list of technical resources, select PRT00, which represents serial number associated with the printer. Next, enter the period start date… followed by the period end date. … Enter a quantity of 300 in the Quantity field. And select the Create button.

We return to the manage Usage Records page displaying existing usage records. Select the Create button again. This time select the Premium Print Group for the Technical Resource Type. For the Technical Resource ID, select PRT00 again. Also, enter the same date and times as Standard Print Group for the period start and end dates. This time enter a quantity of 5 in the Quantity field. Select the Create button. Once uploaded, SAP Subscription Billing immediately rates the data in the background and appends the information to the bill.

After uploading the usage data, you can still make corrections by selecting the usage data and changing the quantity. You may also create a new usage data entry. Or create another data record by selecting the same start and end date and overwriting. Note that if you correct usage on a closed bill, it will not be affected. Instead, a new bill will be created with the correction.

Let’s take a closer look at this bill. If you select the 10 euros printing fee under Standard Print Group General Info tab, the Printing Fee details window opens.

The amount for Standard Print Group has changed from zero to 10 euros. We have set the usage fee to five cents per page. The expected net amount for usage is 300 euros multiplied by five cents equaling 15 euros. This leaves a net amount of 10 euros because this product has an allowance of 100 pages at no extra charge.

Display any zero amounts by selecting the Price Elements Tab and changing the view from Non-Zero Amounts to All.

To view more bill information, refer to the Item List section. Bill items correspond to subscription items and contain the following information:

• Subscription and product.
• Monetary amount for item.
• Detailed information about the charges or credits, such as the rate element, rating period, pricing and usage information, and allowance consumption.
• And any custom references that are inherited from the subscription, subscription item, or product.

Now that we have a better understanding of usage data and interpreting item details, let’s see the billing process in action.

In SAP Subscription Billing, bill and transfer statuses indicate the current phase of a bill and its subsequent transfer to an accounting system for further processing.

This feature provides tracks billing status to ensure that the transfer of accounting data to an organization's ERP system is successful and free of errors. Proper tracking of billing and transfer assists in maintaining accurate financial records and managing cash flow. Let’s examine the lifecycle of a bill.

When we created our new customer in Unit 3, we assigned a custom reference that allows you to attach custom information to different objects in SAP Subscription Billing. In our case, we used the object type product.

Depending on their configured object types, these custom references are displayed on the bill under the Custom References tab. As the bills are replicated to the backend system for invoicing, you can then map the custom reference fields, which are available in the bill, to specific fields in the backend system. 

Let’s examine the inheritance of custom references. We’ve talked about custom references throughout this course, where we set up custom references when we created the customer in unit 3.

For example, a custom reference defined at the product level is only displayed in the bill item. However, if a custom reference is created at the customer level, it is displayed at the bill header level. Custom references are inherited from other objects and cannot be created at the bill level.

Charges and credits are reflected on a single bill if they share the same values for the following properties:

• Invoice required or not required (as determined by the subscription type) 
• Billing profile
• Billing period
• Market
• Time zone (if the subscription’s time zone differs from the market time zone) 
• Customer
• Payer (if different from the customer) Billing date Bill split element (if specified in the subscription)
• Bill-to party (if different from the customer)
• Billing type (charge or credit)
• Payment method or credit card managed in SAP Subscription Billing
• Contract account from SAP S/4HANA Cloud (if used to manage payment details and specified in the subscription item)
• Billing date
• Bill split element (if specified in the subscription)

Now you should understand how Custom References work. The reason we are concluding this chapter with the topic of 'Custom References' is that the Bill is the final object on our roadmap. From here, we move towards the backend system, such as S/4HANA Cloud. Since the backend system continues working with the Bill, it's crucial to grasp that the Custom References from all objects eventually end up in the Bill, enabling their later use in the backend system by mapping the Custom References to specific fields in the backend system.