1. Using Receivables Credit to Cash
  2. Overview of Balance Forward Billing

Overview of Balance Forward Billing

Use balance forward billing to consolidate the open transactions belonging to a customer account or customer site into a single bill that you send on a regular basis, instead of sending a separate invoice for each individual transaction.

Considerations for balance forward billing include:

  • Balance Forward Bill Details

  • Balance Forward Billing Cycles

  • Bill Consolidation at Account or Site Level

  • Balance Forward Billing Number

Balance Forward Bill Details

A balance forward bill contains:

  • Beginning balance or the balance carried over from the last billing period.

  • Itemized list of current charges and activities (such as invoices, credit memos, debit memos, adjustments) in either summary or detail format.

  • Payment received during the last billing period.

  • Current total outstanding balance.

Note: You can't update transactions that are included on a balance forward bill, regardless of the setting of the Allow Change to Printed Transactions Receivables system option. Receivables considers inclusion on a balance forward bill to be a transaction activity, and therefore you can't update a transaction once it has activity against it.

Balance Forward Billing Cycles

Use balance forward billing cycles to generate balance forward bills on a weekly, monthly, bimonthly, quarterly, yearly, or even daily basis.

To create a balance forward billing cycle:

  1. Navigate to the Manage Balance Forward Billing Cycles page.

  2. Click the Plus (+) icon to open the Create Balance Forward Billing Cycle window.

  3. In the Name field, enter a name that identifies this balance forward billing cycle.

  4. In the Start Date field, enter the date to generate the first balance forward bill. All subsequent balance forward bills in this billing cycle are determined by the date you enter here.

  5. In the Frequency field, select Monthly, Weekly, or Daily.

  6. If you select Monthly:

    1. In the Repeat Every field, enter a number to indicate the monthly gap between bills. For example, enter 1 to send a monthly bill; enter 3 to send a quarterly bill; enter 6 to send a biannual bill.

    2. In the Day of Month section, select the day of the month, or Last Day of Month, to send the bill. All applicable transactions with a billing date on or before the selected day of the month are included in the balance forward bill.

    3. Enable the Exclude Saturdays and Sundays option to exclude weekends from balance forward billing.

  7. If you select Weekly:

    1. In the Repeat Every field, enter a number to indicate the weekly gap between bills. For example, enter 1 to send a weekly bill; enter 4 to send a bill every four weeks (which isn't a monthly bill).

    2. In the Day of Week section, select the day of the week to send the weekly bill. All applicable transactions with a billing date on or before the selected day of the week are included in the balance forward bill.

  8. If you select Daily:

    1. In the Repeat Every field, enter a number to indicate the daily gap between bills. For example, enter 1 to send a bill every day; enter 7 to send a bill once a week.

      All applicable transactions with a billing date on or before the selected day are included in the balance forward bill.

    2. Enable the Exclude Saturdays and Sundays option to exclude weekends from balance forward billing.

Bill Consolidation at Account or Site Level

You can generate bills consolidated at either the customer account or site level:

  • Account-level balance forward billing lets you generate one bill for each business unit of the customer account, addressed to the primary bill-to site of the account.

  • Site-level balance forward billing lets you generate a balance forward bill for each bill-to site of a customer account that has multiple bill-to sites.

    You can exclude a site from a balance forward bill by disabling balance forward billing on the customer profile of the site.

Balance Forward Billing Number

When you print a draft or final balance forward bill, the process generates a unique balance forward billing number and assigns this number to each transaction on the bill. You can use the balance forward billing number to:

  • Query transactions that are included in a balance forward bill.

  • Accept a final balance forward bill.

  • Optionally reprint a draft or final balance forward bill.

  • Apply payment against the transactions in a balance forward bill.

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