Running Bills and Viewing Bill Details
You can open the Bill Management page and view Bills for your Accounts for the current month. From there, you can:
Open a Bill for an Account to review the Bill details.
Reset the billing period to list the Bills for your Accounts for that period.
If you've set up an integration with a 3rd-party system for sending outbound Bills to the system, you can check the status and then review details of the last completed integration run. You can also use an external reference link to open the linked invoice in your external system.
Filter the Bills listed by status: Locked or Approved/Pending.
Reorder columns for Bill Management.
Run Bills manually for a specific Bill date for your Accounts. You can run Bills:
Either for all billing frequencies or a specific frequency, such as for weekly or monthly frequency.
For a specific target currency.
This topic explains how to work in the Bill Management page to view Bill details, reorder the columns for the Bills listed, and run Bills manually:
Tip: Viewing and Running Bills for Specific Accounts? It's sometimes easier to go into an Account and view and run Bills directly from the Bills tab - see Reviewing and Recalculating Bills for an Account.
Tip: Encountering Billing Issues? If you are having issues with Bills - such as a Bill is not generating for an Account or line item and/or total amounts are not what you expect them to be for a Bill, please review the Troubleshooting Bills in this section, which offers a checklist of common billing issues with guidance on how to follow-up on and resolve issues.
Viewing Bill Details
To view Bill details:
1. Select Billing. The Bill management page opens and lists the Bills for your Accounts for the default settings to cover the current month period for Invoice date. Details of the current Bills for each Account for this period are given, such as:
REFERENCE
EXTERNAL REFERENCE
EXTERNAL INVOICE DATE
ACCOUNT NAME
ACCOUNT CODE
TOTAL
STATUS
LAST CALC DATE
Tips:
Bill REFERENCE number? We recommend that you set up the REFERENCE Bill numbering to suit your accounting and operational requirements, which you can enable at Organization level. This allows you to define a Bill prefix combined with a sequential numbering based on the date Bills are first created. If you do not enable Bill numbering, then a default Bill REFERENCE number is used, which concatenates the prefix INV- with the last four characters of the Bill's ID. See Viewing and Editing Organization Configuration.
No Bills Listed? If none of the Accounts in your Organization have Bills for the default current month, then a warning will show to tell you this. You can change the default settings for the Invoice date period and the page will automatically refresh.
2. If you want to view the Bills for a different billing period, use the popup Invoice date calendar icons to adjust the period accordingly. The Bill management page adjusts to show Bills for the selected period:
The default period when you open Bill Management is the current month.
When you open the calendar pop-ups, you can select for pre-defined periods of This month or Last month.
Notes:
Invoice dates are inclusive! Note that when you define a period to view Bills using the Invoice Date calendar popups, both the start and end date are interpreted inclusively.
Single day Invoice date period? You can define a single day as the period you want to show Bills for.
3. All Bills are shown by default, regardless of their status. You can filter the list of Bills to show only those with a specific status. See below: Filtering Bills by Status.
4. If you want to view the Bills for a specific Account, you can select the ACCOUNT NAME text in the listing. You are taken to the Account Overview page where you can review the Bills for the Account.
5. To view the details of a Bill for an Account, select the REFERENCE text hotlink. The Bill management>Details page for the Bill opens. This page provides a full breakdown of the charges due on the Account for the billing period for the Invoice date.
A Bill Details panel gives details of the Bill:
Two text hotlinks are provided:
To open the details page of the Account the Bill is for.
If you've set up an integration for sending Bills for the Account to a 3rd-party system, then the date/time and status of the last run for the integration are shown. The text hotlink takes you to the details page for the Last Completed Integration Run. Checking integration run details can be very useful when you have implemented an integration with your external invoicing system and you need to troubleshoot if the run fails. For more details, see Reviewing Integration Run Details.
Note that if the last integration run was successful, then the External Invoice Reference will also show as a hotlink text. If you select this hotlink, you'll be taken to the invoice generated in the 3rd-party external system by the integration run.
Note that if the Account the Bill was generated for has since been deleted, the Bill will open in Bill management but the Bill Details panel will be incomplete and you'll receive an Account loading error - for example:
6. Scroll down to review the remainder of the Bill:
The Bill Total is shown at top-left for quick reference.
Bill line items are grouped for charges due for Products consumed and Prepayment/Commitment fees due.
For Product charge line items, select the DESCRIPTION text to open the details of the priced Product Plan used to determine the line item charge.
Expand a Product standing charge line item to review the Plan that was used to set up the charge raised against the Account. You can then select a hotlink text to open the details page for the Plan.
Expand a Product usage charge line item, as shown in this example, for the Storage charges in GiBy and review:
The Plan, Aggregation, and Meter used to configure the rating for the usage charges raised against the Account. You can then select hotlink texts to open the details pages for each of these.
How the total charge for the line item breaks down into the separate charges due for each tiered pricing band.
For Prepayment fee line items, select the DESCRIPTION text to open the details page for the Prepayment attached to the billed Account.
Expand Prepayment fee line items to review the Prepayment drawn-down against for the line item. You can then select a hotlink text to open the details page for the Prepayment.
Viewing Bills - Notes and Tips
Here are some notes and tips to bear in mind when viewing Bills:
Line Item Types. You can review a list of the different line item types used on Bills in the Bill Line Item Types topic in this section.
Line Item Descriptions. There are several places where you have the option to define the description texts you want to appear for Bill line items. If you don't define these description texts for line items, then default descriptions are used. For details on how these default descriptions are compiled, see the Bill Line Items - Default Descriptions topic in this section.
Zero Usage Line Items. If you are viewing a Bill with many zero usage line items, you can use the Hide zero quantity line items switch to reduce clutter on the Bill.
Currency Conversions. If your pricing currency is different to the billing currency, Currency Conversions will be shown at the bottom of a Bill. See Creating and Managing Currencies.
Billing Amounts Decimal Places. The number of decimal places shown for the billing currency amounts depends upon the configured decimal places for the currency in your Organization - see Creating and Managing Currencies.
Filtering Bills by Status
When you select a period for the Bills you want to load into Bill Management, you might want to filter the list to help find specific Bills more easily. You can filter the Bills listed by Status:
To filter Bills by Status:
1. Select Billing>Bill Management. The Bill Management page opens and the Invoice Date range is set for the current month and any Bills for that period are listed.
2. If required, update the Invoice Date range for the period you want to view Bills for. The page adjusts to show Bills for the selected period.
3. If you want to filter the Bills listed, use the Status drop-down to select the filter you want to apply to the Bills list:
All. Show all Bills, both Locked and Approved/Pending Status. This is the default.
Locked. Only show Bills whose current Status is Locked.
Approved/Pending. Only show Bills whose current Status is Approved/Pending.
The Bills list adjusts for the Status filter you've selected.
Reordering Columns for Bill Management
When working with Bills in Bill Management, you can quickly reorder columns to suit your current operational purposes. For example, you might want to show STATUS and LAST CALC DATE as the first two columns.
To reorder columns for the Bills list:
1. Select Billing>Bill Management. The Bill Management page opens and the Invoice Date range is set for the current month and any Bills for that period are listed.
2. If required, update the Invoice Date range for the period you want to view Bills for. The page adjusts to show Bills for the selected period.
3. If you want to reorder the columns of the Bills list, select the book icon at the top-right of the list. Note that you might have to scroll to the right to see this icon:
4. On the Reorder Columns panel that appears, drag-and-drop columns to give the order you want to show on the page:
Repeat until you have a top-bottom order of columns that you want to appear in left-right order on the page:
5. Select Update. The Reorder Columns panel closes and the Bill Management page refreshes to show the reordered columns for the Bills list:
Running Bills Manually
At any time, you might want to run bills manually for a specific Bill date. You can use the Run billing modal to do this.
When you open the Run billing modal, a default of All is selected for Bill frequency. But if you want to run billing manually for only those Accounts that are on a specific billing frequency, you can use the drop-down list to select the frequency:
Daily
Weekly
Monthly
Annually
Ad Hoc Use this setting when a custom billing schedule is used for billing an Account, such as for billing of Prepayment/Commitment fees using a custom billing schedule.
You can set up the manual billing run to suit your current needs - you might want to run Bills for your Accounts covering All billing frequencies. But you might have a specific purpose in performing a manual billing run. For example, suppose some historical usage data has come in for an Account on a monthly billing frequency and you want to run billing for the relevant billing date - the first of the month following - and check that the Bill updates correctly. The following steps show how to use the Run billing modal for this sort of case.
Warnings!
Billing does not run for Child Accounts separately! Only when you run billing for a Parent Account will billing run for its Child Accounts.
Maximum number of concurrent Bill jobs is restricted to 10! If you already have 10 Bill jobs currently running, and try to create another one, you'll get an HTTP 429 response (Too many requests). When one of the existing bill jobs has completed, you'll be able to submit another job.
Tip: Running Bills for Specific Accounts? It's sometimes easier to go into an Account and run Bills directly for a specific Account from the Bills tab - see Reviewing and Recalculating Bills for an Account.
To run Bills manually:
1. Select Billing>Bill Management. The Bill Management page opens.
2. First, update the Invoice Date date range to include the Account Bill you want to check. The page will refresh to show Bills with dates in the date range and you can identify the Account Bill you want to check for new charges due to new historical usage data:
3. Select Run billing to launch the Run billing modal and set the Invoice Date you want. For this example, we've set November 1st 2023 and selected Monthly for Bill Frequency:
In this example, we want to check for new historical usage data submitted for the Account in October 2023.
Warning! Billing frequency not showing on modal? If you've enabled Consolidate bills in your Organization configuration, the Billing frequency option is not available when you run billing manually - an advisory will show on the modal with a link to open the Organization Configuration page. Please see the notes on enabling the Consolidate bills option for your Organization in the Viewing and Editing Organization Configuration topic in the Managing your Organization section.
4. On the modal, select Run billing. The modal closes and the billing run starts. Note that you can track the billing run progress by clicking the Tasks icon at top-right to open the Running Tasks panel:
When the billing run for the selected date and frequency completes, the Bill listing updates for the newly submitted historical usage data on the example monthly-billed Account:
We can see that for the example Account the Bill total has increased as expected for the charges due for historical usage data submitted in October 2023.
Tip: Selecting a Target Billing currency? You can select a Target currency on the Run billing modal from the list of currencies you've set up for your Organization:
If you leave Target currency blank, the billing currency used for any bills generated for the Bill job depends on what you've defined as the billing currency at either Account and Organization level.
If you've defined a currency for an Account and chosen to override the Organization currency for the Account, then the billing currency used when you run Bills manually for the Account will be the Account currency. If you haven't defined an Account currency, then the Organization currency is used for billing the Account.
If you select a Target currency, then any bills generated for the Bill job will be created using the selected currency as the billing currency.
Warning! Remember that you must first configure any required currency conversion rates if the selected Target currency is different to the pricing currency configured for use on an Account, otherwise Bills will fail for the Account and you'll receive an ERROR alert under Alerts. For more details see Creating and Managing Currencies.
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