Generating Consolidated Billing Through the Billing Interface
The Billing interface supports automatic generation of consolidated bill headers. To generate a consolidated bill, each bill must be attached to a consolidated bill. Consolidated bill headers may have standard bills related to them. They do not have bill lines related to them.
To generate consolidated bill headers by using the Billing interface, you must populate either the CONSOL_KEY column or the CONSOL_CUST_ID and CONSOL_SETID columns for LINE transaction types. Alternatively, populate all three fields through defaulting or by passing them to the INTFC_BI table. All three of these fields appear by default from the customer.
To consolidate bills across bill-to customers, the source system must provide a value for CONSOL_SETID and CONSOL_CUST_ID, or these values must be obtained through defaulting. If the interface cannot find a value for these two fields, but it does find a value for CONSOL_KEY, it assumes that the consolidation customer is the bill-to customer.
The interface process uses the consolidation fields to determine how billing data should be consolidated. For example, you populate the staging area with two kinds of activity: contract billing activity and miscellaneous billing activity. To generate bills by contract and consolidate all contract bills for the customer, provide a standard value in the consolidation key (such as CONSOL/CONTRACTS). When the interface process generates a new bill header that has a value in the consolidation key, it establishes whether a consolidated bill header exists for the same billing currency, with the same consolidation key. If so, the process attaches a new bill to the consolidated header. Otherwise, the process generates a new consolidated bill header and attaches the new bill header to this. Do not populate the consolidation fields (CONSOL_KEY, CONSOL_SETID, and CONSOL_CUST_ID) with a value if the miscellaneous activity should not be consolidated. If the miscellaneous activity should be consolidated, but not with the contract activity, populate the consolidation key with a different value (such as CONSOL/MISC).
To override the defaults for the consolidation fields, you must make the fields part of the bill-by.
Note: Default information for consolidated bills is maintained at the customer level. The Load AR process (BILDAR01) does not create open items for consolidated bills at the consolidated bill header level. It creates open items for consolidated bills at the attached bill level or attached bill line level.
The Billing Interface process does not support consolidation of adjustment transactions or consolidation of temporary bills.
If any bill attached to a consolidated header contains a line with a summarization template, all bills attached to that header must also contain at least one line with a summarization template.
(NLD) When consolidating acceptgiro invoices, all bills attached to a header must have the same Billing business unit and customer ID.