Guidelines for Updating Recurring Bill Plans

You may need to update one or more details of a recurring bill plan to reflect changes to the terms of the contract with your customer.

Use the Edit Recurring Bill plan page to update a bill plan. Until you generate transactions for a bill plan, you can update any attribute except the business unit assignment and the bill plan name. Updates to a bill plan that hasn't generated transactions aren't tracked in the recurring bill plan history.

Once you generate transactions for a bill plan, the attributes that you can update are restricted, and all changes are tracked in the recurring bill plan history, except for updates to special instructions or descriptive flexfields.

Note: Updates to a recurring bill plan affect future-generated transactions only. You can't use the bill plan to modify transactions already generated by the bill plan.

Review these guidelines for updating a recurring bill plan:

• Inactivate a Recurring Bill Plan

• Change Assignments to a Recurring Bill Plan

• Update Invoice Lines

• Rules for Changing the Price of Invoice Line Items

Inactivate a Recurring Bill Plan

After the life of a bill plan is complete and the last transactions generated, you should inactivate the bill plan by deselecting the Active option. A bill plan should be inactivated after the contract end date.

If necessary, you can temporarily inactivate a bill plan, for example, to renegotiate terms of the contract or decide upon a new end date for the contract. While the bill plan is inactive:

• You can't make any updates to the bill plan.

• Running the Generate Recurring Billing Data program doesn't generate transactions for the bill plan.

After you reactivate the bill plan and make any necessary updates, the next run of the Generate Recurring Billing Data program generates all transactions that hadn't been generated since the bill plan was inactivated.

For example, a year-long contract began on January 1 with a billing frequency of Monthly. The first invoice was generated on January 1, but the bill plan was inactivated on January 20. After negotiations, the bill plan was reactivated on March 15. The next run of the Generate Recurring Billing Data program generates invoices for February and March.

Change Assignments to a Recurring Bill Plan

The bill plan contains certain attributes that may change during the life of a bill plan. These attributes are:

• Transaction source

• Transaction type

• Currency

• Salesperson

Changes include inactivating the attribute, updating the start and end dates, or updating details of the attribute that are incompatible with a bill plan. For example, the employment information of a salesperson assigned to invoice lines might change. Or, you might change the contract end date of a bill plan beyond the end date of the transaction source or transaction type assigned to the bill plan.

In these and similar cases, you must replace the related fields with appropriate attributes. Ensure that the new attribute is active for the duration of the bill plan, and is otherwise compatible with the bill plan.

Update Invoice Lines

Update the invoice lines of a recurring bill plan to reflect changes to the invoicing terms of the contract agreed upon with your customer. Updates to invoice lines affect future transactions only. Future transactions are transactions generated after you update the bill plan. The invoice lines of transactions already generated don't change.

You can perform these updates to invoice lines:

• Add one or more bill plan lines: Click the plus (+) icon to add an invoice line. You can enter an inventory item, memo line, or description to create the line item. Enter the quantity and, for descriptions, the unit price to calculate the line amount. Complete the remaining information for the new line according to your requirements.

• Delete existing bill plan lines: Select a line and click the delete (x) icon to delete a line.

• Update the quantity of an item: Use the Quantity field to update the quantity to be billed for an existing invoice line.

• Make a price change to a line item: Use the New Price and Effective From fields to enter the new price for the line item and the date the new price becomes effective.

Rules for Changing the Price of Invoice Line Items

You can change the price of a line item to reflect changes to the terms of the contract with your customer.

If necessary, you can expose the New Price and Effective From fields on an invoice line by selecting them from the View menu: View > Columns > Line Information > New Price and Effective From.

These rules apply to changing the price of a line item:

• You can either increase or decrease the price of a line item.

• The date a new price becomes effective is a future date only. You can't enter an effective date for a price change earlier than or equal to the system date.

  You can enter a future effective date for either the current billing period or a future billing period.

• You can only change the price of a line item once during the current billing period, meaning, before the next transaction is generated. After the next transaction is generated, the new price becomes the current unit price. If necessary, you can change the price again before the next billing period.

• The total transaction amount isn't prorated in the billing period that the new price becomes effective.

  For example, the first transaction date of a bill plan is January 1, with a billing frequency of Monthly. If you change the price of a line item on February 10 with an effective date of February 15, the transaction generated on March 1 will consider the new price of the line item for the entire month of February, not just February 15-28.