If you use an external system for some or all of your billing, you may benefit from the Billing Platforms feature in The Layer.

Billing Platforms are assigned to items in inventory in the form of a Billing Route, and can be used to represent an external billing system.

Items with an external billing route assigned will not be invoiceable from The Layer. Instead, you can take advantage of our custom reports, work stacks, and other tools to ensure that items are transferred successfully to your billing system.

Note - for specific information on working with Affinity as your billing platform, check this link.

Administrators can access Billing Platforms from Settings.

All that is required at this point is the Platform Name. This will most likely be the name of the external application,

The billing route for a product or service's up-front and recurring charges can be set independently in the item's record in inventory.

You can also set this during inventory import:

Only items with an up-front billing route of The Layer, or with no up-front billing route set, will be invoiceable in The Layer.

This acts as a mechanism to prevent accidental invoicing of items that should .

The Bill Status field against a Sales Order line is used to reflect an item's current position in the billing process. The following states are present in The Layer:

Items with a billing route set will transition from one state to another based on various events. The first trigger is conversion to asset.

The second trigger depends on the item type:

Billing Status can be seen on the sales order grid as a coloured circle.

This is based on both recurring and up-front statuses.

You can check the statuses in more detail in Data Capture:

These values will be read-only unless you have the Allow update billing user role.

The Bill Start Date indicates the day on which billing will begin. This is populated as below:

The Billing Export tool is an App within The Layer. It is accessible from the Apps button on the menu at the bottom of the screen, for users with the Apps - Change Queue role.

This app allows us to view items that have either an up-front or recurring billing status of Ready to Bill.

You must use the drop-down in the top-right to select the desired Billing Route. This filters the grid for you, and enables exporting.

The following functions are available:

The two exports can be used to create spreadsheet files that may be useful when uploading to the external system. It is important to discuss your requirements in terms of contents, formatting etc. with us.

The Billing Transfer button is used to change the status of selected lines from Ready to Bill to In Billing.