Overview of Subscription Billing

Subscription Management supports configurable billing frequencies, advance and arrears billing, partial period billing, and milestone billing.

You can use any of these billing strategies for your subscriptions. You can also configure your billing for prepayments at the product level.

In addition, Subscription Management offers you the flexibility to bill customers monthly, quarterly, annually, or by your company-defined frequencies. Company-defined frequencies can be bi-monthly, weekly, and so on. Use the different billing capabilities to do accomplish:

Bill charges in advance or in arrears
Stop billing
Use company-specific billing rules
Schedule bill runs for business units or customers
Create company-specific billing schedules
Create a credit memo and capture the reason for creating a credit memo
Create bill adjustment and capture the reason for creating a bill adjustment
Use milestone billing to bill based on an ad-hoc date or a date on the completion of an event

Note: You create and manage the reasons for creating credit memo and bill adjustments using:

Summarized Versus Detailed Billing

When you add a coverage product to your subscription, you have the option to view the summarized charges of each line item from multiple covered levels or separate line items for each charge. For summarized bills, bill lines across all covered lines are grouped by the charge definition for specific periods and displayed at the coverage product level.

Let's see an example of detailed and summarized billing. Here's a setup of a coverage product and its covered levels.

Coverage Line - Gold Support 1 Year Charge - Activation Fee $1000
            Covered Level Asset: A Qty: 6 Charge - Setup Fee $1000 Charge - Monthly Service Fee
            $100/Month Covered Level Asset: B Qty:5 Charge - Setup Fee $500 Charge - Monthly Service
            Fee $50/Month

Here's what the detailed bill would look like:

Period	Charge Name	Amount	Invoice Text
0	Activation Fee	$1000
0	Setup Fee	$1000	Asset A
0	Setup Fee	$500	Asset B
1	Monthly Fee	$100	Asset A
1	Monthly Fee	$50	Asset B

Now, let see what your summarized bill would look like:

Period	Charge Name	Amount
0	Activation Fee	$1000
0	Setup Fee	$1500
1	Monthly Fee	$150

Caution: If you adjust the price on a summary bill line using an amount of 0, it's not possible to calculate the rate of increase. Thus, the application is unable to distribute the adjustment to asset-level bill lines.

Note that the covered lines aren't grouped. They're listed individually in the detailed bill. In the summarized bill, the charge items are grouped by Setup Fee and Monthly Fee.

Revenue Management Cloud Integration

Oracle Revenue Management Cloud Service needs subscriptions-related data to manage the revenue recognition process. Revenue is recognized for the performance obligations as and when different events occur. As part of this integration process, Revenue Management Service does the following:

Automatically imports subscription lines for subscription products, coverage products, and usage products.
Automatically imports subscription changes as revisions for Oracle Subscription Management. These are treated as retrospective accounting revisions in Revenue Management
Imports subscription billing from Receivables to Revenue Management to clear contract asset balances, record discounts, and record initial performance events.

Here are the subscription events that initiate data a transfer to Revenue Management:

Subscription amendment
Subscription renewal
Subscription termination
Usage billing
Evergreen billing
Pricing terms

Note: You can only interface subscription records to Revenue Management when both subscription header and associated products are in the active status.

For integration information, see Guidelines for Integrating Revenue Management with Subscription Management.

Invoice Text

To process the descriptions of the invoice by Accounts Receivable, you must add attributes for the subscription invoice text. This includes charge name, product name, bill to date, bill from date, and so on. The subscription invoice text supports up to 150 characters. By default the invoice text appears as follows: [$Subscription Number] [$Product Name] [$Charge Name] [$Bill from Date] [$Bill to Date]. For more information, see Subscription Profiles in the Implementing Subscription Management guide.