Using the Bill-By Identifier with the Billing Interface

By adding one or more fields to the bill-by definition, you instruct the Billing interface to use those fields to determine which uninvoiced bills will receive interface activity and when a new bill should be started for billing activity.

When you create new bill-by IDs:

1. Use the fewest number of bill-by fields that meet your requirements.

2. From external interfaces, you may want to populate default fields if you know their values.

   This action reduces the work required by the Billing Interface process and can significantly improve batch performance.

If you have a bill-by identifier defined with fields ORDER_NO and SHIP_TO_ADDR_NUM, for example, the Billing Interface process generates a new bill for each distinct combination of order number and ship-to location for each customer. For each line of activity in the interface staging area, the Billing Interface process determines whether an uninvoiced bill exists for that business unit, bill-to customer, bill type, billing currency, order number, and ship-to location. If a bill exists, the process adds the interface line of activity to that bill as another bill line provided that the bill status of the existing bill allows new lines to be added. If no bill exists, the process generates a new bill header and adds the interface line activity to the new bill.

For example, five lines of billable activity are populated in the interface staging area for customer 5001. Before you ran the Billing Interface process for the activity in the following table, one uninvoiced bill existed for business unit US001, customer 5001, order 550122, and ship-to location 1. Order number 5554095 had no existing bills. The Billing Interface process determines that a bill exists for order number 5550122, ship-to location 1, and adds lines 1 and 2 to that bill. It then generates two new bill headers: one for order 5554095, ship-to location 1; and one for order 5554095, ship-to location 2. The process adds lines 3 and 5 to the first of these two new bills. It adds line 4 to the second of these two new bill headers, as shown in this table:

Before the Billing Interface process evaluates interface activity to determine whether new bill headers are required, it evaluates the customer, bill source, bill type, and business unit characteristics to send the appropriate bill-by to the interface staging area by default. The Billing Interface process then uses the bill-by identifiers to determine which new bill headers need to be generated.

If, for example, you have a different bill-by identifier defined for each bill type, the Billing Interface process selects by default the bill-by identifier for each bill type. It groups the interface data for each bill type by using the bill-by criteria of that type.

You must define some fields together as part of the bill-by in order for the functionality of the fields to process correctly. For example, to use the user-defined currency rate functionality, you must define three fields together in the bill-by: CUR_RT_SOURCE, RATE_MULT, and RATE_DIV. If you define only one or two of these fields in the bill-by criteria, the system creates a bill with erroneous rate information.

Other fields that work as a group are listed in the following table:

You should include SHIP_FROM_BU as a bill-by field for transactions from Order Management or Inventory that will be subject to VAT.

When the Billing Interface process generates a new bill header, the system uses default values for much of the data, if it is not provided. The defaulting mechanism operates by using the same hierarchy as online bill entry defaulting. For example, payment terms codes appear by default onto new bill headers from customer, bill source, bill type, and business unit, in that order. To override bill header defaults applied by the Billing Interface process, you must provide data (in the interface table) in the field that you want to override, and include that field in the bill-by criteria. For example, to override the Billing interface payment terms defaulting, populate the payment terms field on the interface table, and ensure that the bill-by identifier includes PYMNT_TERMS_CD.

Data in the interface staging area is grouped for billing according to the bill-by fields defined for the bill-by identifier. The system always populates this data on the bill header. In the preceding example, the order number and ship-to location appear on both bill header and bill line tables. The order number and ship-to location are the same for all lines on the bill. If the preceding activity had five different shipment types, the shipment types would be populated on the bill line table but not on the bill header. However, if you defined the bill-by identifier with the fields ORDER_NUM and SHIP_TYPE_ID, the system populates the order number and shipment type on both the bill header and bill line tables, and the ship-to location would be a variable at the bill line level.

These fields are implied bill-by fields and need not be specified:

• BUSINESS_UNIT

• BILL_TO_CUST_ID

• BILL_TYPE_ID

• BILL_SOURCE_ID (if invoice numbering is set to bill source)

• BI_CURRENCY_CD

• HDR_FIELDS_KEY

• BUSINESS_UNIT_TO

• COUNTRY_SHIP_FROM (if the transaction is subject to VAT)

• COUNTRY_SHIP_TO (if the transaction is subject to VAT)

• COUNTRY_VAT_BILLFR (if the transaction is subject to VAT)

• COUNTRY_VAT_BILLTO (if the transaction is subject to VAT)

• VAT_TREATMET_GRP (if the transaction is subject to VAT)

For the system to consider a field a bill-by field, that field must exist both in the bill header (BI_HDR) record and in the Billing Interface table (INTFC_BI). Some exceptions exist, such as PROCESS_INSTANCE, AR_LVL, and GL_LVL fields. The fields listed in the following two tables exist in both the Bill Header table and the Billing Interface table, but they do not exist in the Bill Line table. Data in the first table does not appear on the bill header unless it is defined as a bill-by field. Data in the second table has default values provided by the Billing Interface process from various setup tables (such as Customer, Bill Source, Bill Type, Billing Business Unit). If you want to override the default, you must provide an override value and include the field on the list of bill-by fields on the bill-by identifier definition.

The fields listed between the two tables are referred as commonly shared fields. A commonly shared field exists in all three tables: INTFC_BI, BI_HDR, and BI_LINE.