Understanding the Bill-By Identifier
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:
-
Use the fewest number of bill-by fields that meet your requirements.
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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:
| Line | Business Unit | Customer | Order Number | Ship To Location | Amount |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
|
1 |
US001 |
5001 |
5550122 |
1 |
500 USD |
|
2 |
US001 |
5001 |
5550122 |
1 |
2000 USD |
|
3 |
US001 |
5001 |
5554095 |
1 |
45 USD |
|
4 |
US001 |
5001 |
5554095 |
2 |
4700 USD |
|
5 |
US001 |
5001 |
5554095 |
1 |
16000 USD |
Note:
Do not use this bill-by concept for full bill adjustments and transactions referencing a target invoice.