Introduction
When you invoice in advance, and your billable units change during the billed period, the system automatically creates a prorated transaction, which you must then invoice to your customer. The prorated transaction will have an effective date equal to the date that the billing unit count changed. However, if you use billing automation, the effective date falls outside of the next billing period and so by default, the prorated transaction will be missed.
For example, suppose you have a recurring service contract that is billed by contact. You invoice your customer in advance for July, and the contact count is 10. On July 15th the contact count changes to 11. A prorated transaction for the remainder of July-- support for one contact for 15 days -- should be invoiced in August. But, when your automated billing job runs in August, it will not pick up this transaction because the effective date is in July, not August!
This behavior is expected, but in order to catch these prorated transactions, you have to create a secondary billing automation job that acts as a sweeper.
Important: The scheduler of the second job should always be set to run after the default periodic billing job.
Instructions
We will be utilizing two automation jobs that run every month. In this article, our examples will assume that your billing is monthly and the job is scheduled on the 1st of every month. We will consider July and August as the current and following month to show a sample sweeper billing job to address proration.
Setup
Finance > Billing automation
Create a Default monthly job with date parameters: From today until the end of the month.
This job is meant to bill your units for the current month. Depending on your scheduled date the From and To date should be adjusted.
Bills all units in part of July.
Create a secondary job with date parameters: From the start to the end of the Month before.
This job is meant to pick up units going back one month during your current billing cycle.
The job will execute the selected action type of all items that are within this date range.
Any increments or decrements of two units will be added as separate invoice line items to the prorated cost associated with it.
Bills all additional units in part of July. The scheduler will run a second job in August to pull all the proration units for July.
You can set specific contract filters as part of the job.
Tip!
Bill Zero Value Items:
Time entries logged against a recurring service contract are considered zero-value items. If you would like to list them in your invoice you can choose Yes in the checkbox, when creating a billing job.
This can also be enabled by default under Admin > My Company > Company Settings > Invoice