Scheduling in Billing and Invoicing

Lesson Overview

At the conclusion of this lesson, you will be able to explain the basic scheduling concept for billing and invoicing processes.

Business Example

Print Service Corporation has two large customer groups:

Private Customer
Business Customer

Since Business Customer have a large volume of BITs, Print Service Corporation runs billing process for business customer each day, and summarizes BITs according to origin day together. For private customer all BITs up to the 13th of the month are collected together and billed on the 15th of each month. This is controlled by the scheduling.

Print Service Corporation has billing subprocesses that are billed daily, because of huge daily amounts of charged items. Other billing subprocesses run only once a month on the 16th of the month and all incoming billable items are set due to the 15th of the month. High volume business needs flexible scheduling tool to handle process dependent requirements according to scheduling.

Bill_FROM date determination:

The billable item is transferred on June 24, 2016.

The schedule characteristic of the contract account is monthly, rule 0001, and has two calculation parts:

Part 1: Rule 0001 valid until date limit 13
→ calculation rule: add days 0, fixed date 15
Part 2: Rule 0001 valid until date limit 31
→ calculation rule: fixed date 15, add month 1
The calculation rule works as follows for the example:
Baseline date = Date of origin billing = 06/24/2016
Take part 2: use fixed day 15 → 06/15/2016
Add one month: 07/15/2016: This is a Sunday
Next working day billing date = 07/16/2016

Business example for scheduling:

All BITs with an origin up to the 13th day of a month should be assigned the 15th of the month as the Bill_FROM date, providing this is a working day. Otherwise, the next working day should be used.

Scheduling for Billing and Invoicing Processes

Definition Billing Target Date:

The target date for billing is the earliest possible billing time for a billable item.
The attribute BILL_FROM of a billable item contains the target date for billing.

Definition Invoicing Target Date:

The target date for invoicing is the earliest possible billing time for a billing document.
The attribute INVOICE_FROM of a billing document contains the target date for invoicing.
The target date is a grouping feature.

The billing target date can be determined as follows:

The billable item can acquire its value from the rating system.
Scheduling in billing is the process of determining the billing target date. This takes into account the scheduling maintained at contract account level (for example, a fixed day of a month).

Financial Accounting (New) → Contract Accounts Receivable and Payable → Convergent Invoicing → Basic Functions → Scheduling.

Screenshot of the customizing activity to maintain assign rules for determining the billing date.

The determination of the target billing date can be influenced by attributes of the billable item such as the scheduling characteristic, subprocess, billable item type, and billing cycle.

You can find the customizing activity for scheduling under Financial Accounting (New) → Contract Accounts Receivable and Payable → Convergent Invoicing → Basic Functions → Scheduling.

You can also simulate the scheduling rule.

Financial Accounting (New) → Contract Accounts Receivable and Payable → Integration → Billing in Contract Accounts Receivable and Payable → Basic Data → Scheduling → Simulate Billing Date.

Screenshot of the customizing activity maintaining calculation rules.

Grouping of billable items:

You can use the target billing date to group billable items into one billing document, and it is available for load balancing.

The same applies to invoicing:

Scheduling in invoicing is the process of determining the invoice target date.

You can use the target invoicing date to group billing documents into one invoice document.

Visualization of the process flow for scheduling.

In some business branches, for example in telecommunication industry, recurring fees that are related to a time period for service usage are linked together with usages on one invoice.

Telcom One wants the customer to be invoiced for service fees for one month starting on the 5th of month up to the 4th of the next month. They define billing cycle 5 for time periods of the 5th of March up to the 4th of April and the 5th of April up to the 4th of May.

Illustration of the optional use of the billing cycle.

Definition Billing Cycle:

The billing cycle is used to specify billing periods. The billing cycle specifies the period end and the length of a billing period. You can assign the BILL_FROM date according to billing cycle, in order to synchronize recurring charges and usage charges. The use of the billing cycle is optional.

Billing cycles are entered in the contract account. The billing cycle can be used in scheduling to determine the target billing/invoicing date based on the period end date.

Scheduling example:

If you have mass data, you can execute the billing run every day, and the invoicing run just once a month. With the daily billing run, you can summarize large amounts of data into a smaller amount of data.

Not all companies need the aggregation process in two steps. This has been developed specifically for companies with high volumes of billable items.