How Does Sales Billing or Convergent Invoicing Integrate with SAP Subscription Billing?
Now that you know the difference between the public and private cloud editions, let’s explore the two modules found within the SAP S/4HANA solution that integrate with SAP Subscription Billing: Sales Billing and Convergent Invoicing.
Sales Billing and Convergent Invoicing are separate processes and serve different purposes within billing and invoicing.
Sales billing:
Sales Billing is a key component of the SAP Sales and Distribution (SD) module. Sales Billing processes and manages billing-related activities for sales and allows organizations to generate invoices for goods or services delivered to customers. Sales Billing creates billing documents, such as invoices and credit memos based on sales orders, deliveries, and other relevant sales-related data. Other functions include pricing, taxes, discounts, and payment terms to provide a comprehensive solution for billing and revenue recognition within the SAP ERP system. The Sales Billing process closely integrates with other SD functions, such as order management and delivery processing to ensure accurate and timely invoicing based on sales transactions.
Convergent Invoicing is often used in industries with high volume subscription-based or recurring billing scenarios, such as telecom and utilities. Convergent Invoicing is part of SAP's BRIM suite, or Billing and Revenue Innovation Management, and allows for the consolidation of charges from multiple different services onto a single invoice. For example, a telecom company might bill for voice, data, and SMS on one invoice. This process offers more flexibility and can handle complex billing scenarios such as discounts, taxes, and real-time rating of consumption-based services.
The key difference is that while Sales Billing is suitable for simple transactions, Convergent Invoicing allows a more complex, flexible, and consolidated approach that suits subscription-based or consumption-based business models. Convergent Invoicing is designed to accommodate a higher volume and wider variety of data than traditional Sales Billing.