Billing Schedules

The billing schedule refers to the frequency at which the billing process is executed. It determines how often the system runs the billing operations to generate invoices and credit memos for customers. 

 

For example, a billing schedule could be set to run on a monthly basis, meaning that billing operations are performed once a month to generate invoices for the respective billing period. Alternatively, the schedule could be configured for a different interval, such as weekly, quarterly, or annually, depending on the specific needs of the business and the terms outlined in customer contracts.

 

By establishing a billing schedule, organizations can maintain a consistent and predictable billing cycle, ensuring that invoices are generated and delivered to customers in a timely manner. This allows for effective financial management, accurate revenue recognition, and improved customer satisfaction by providing clear and transparent billing practices.

Generate Invoices On Order Activation

Admin users can configure the first invoices to be automatically generated and (optionally) activated as soon as the orders are activated. 

• Login to Nue App
• Navigate to Settings → Billing Schedules
• To automatically generate the first invoice in Draft status, enable the option: Automatically generate the first invoice when an order is activated
• To automatically generate the first invoice in Active status, enable the option: Automatically activate the first invoice when an order is activated

If these options are turned on, the system will generate the first invoice using either the current date (Today) or the earliest Next Billing Date among all the products in the order, whichever comes later, as the target date for the invoice.

On Demand Billing Schedule

Finance ops users can schedule to run billing once at a certain time or immediately.

• Login to Nue App.  
• From the menu, navigate to Revneue Manager → Billing Schedules
• Click New Billing Schedule
• In Schedule Type, select On Demand
• Under Schedule, you can select a time to run, or check "Run Immediately" to run the billing schedule now.
• Click Save and Close.  
  • You will be asked: 'The billing schedule is in Draft status. Do you want to activate and run the billing schedule now?', click Yes to activate and execute the billing schedule.

Recurring Billing Schedule

You can create a Billing Schedule that generate invoices, and optionally automatically activate generated invoices on a daily, monthly basis or even with a custom schedule. 

• Login to Nue App.  
• From the menu, navigate to Revneue Manager → Billing Schedules
• Click New Billing Schedule
• In Schedule Type, select Recurring
• Set the Schedule Start Date to the day you want to run the first billing schedule job, and it will be based on the timezone you specified in the Timezone field
• Set the Invoice Date of the invoices generated in the first billing period, and it will be updated automatically in the following billing periods
• If you want to generate active invoices directly, check this option: Automatically activate generated invoices
• Set the frequency of the billing schedule under the Schedule section
• Click Save and Close.

 

Billing Schedule Frequency

You can set the following schedule frequency for recurring billing schedules based on your business requirement:

Daily

Run the billing schedule every day or only on weekdays

Weekly

When running the billing schedule weekly, you are allowed to select multiple dates between Monday and Sunday, the billing job will be executed on the dates you choose every week

Monthly

If you charge your customers on a monthly basis, you can choose this option and set the date of the month you want to generate invoices for your customers. You have options to run the billing schedule job on a specific day of the month(s), or the nth day of the week in each month

Custom

If the above options cannot meet your needs, or you have a special billing frequency for some customers, you can choose to configure the billing schedule frequency based on a custom CRON expression

 

The following tables show the supported CRON expressions for billing schedules:

Parts of a Cron Expression

CRON STATEMENT	VALUES	SPECIAL CHARACTERS
Seconds	0–59	None
Minutes	0–59	None
Hours	0–23	, - * /
Day Of Month	1–31	, - * ? /
Month	1–12, JAN-DEC	, - * /
Day Of Week	1–7, SUN–SAT	, - * ? /

 

Special Characters

CHARACTER	FUNCTION	EXAMPLE
,	Value list separator (Read as "and")	0 0 0 ? * 3,5 means "At 12:00 AM, only on Wednesday and Friday"
-	Specifies a range (Read as "from ... to ..." )	0 0 0 ? * 1-5 means "At 12:00 AM, Monday through Friday"
*	Specifies all values (Read as "every")	0 0 0 1 * * means "At 12:00 AM, on day 1 of every month"
?	Specifies no specific value (Read as "any")	0 0 0 ? 1 * means "At 12:00 AM, every day in January"
/	Specifies increments (The number before the slash specifies when the interval begins. The number after the slash is the interval.)	0 0 1/6 * * * means "Every 6 hours, starting at 01:00 AM"

 

Billing Schedule Filters

When creating a billing schedule, by default, all customers will be billed if they have available orders that need to be invoiced. Sometimes, you may only want to bill for specific customers or even orders, in this case, you can apply filters for the billing schedules. Nue supports different level filters such as customer filter, product filter, and order filter. You can specify any type of filter or combine them together when creating a billing schedule.

 

Customer Filter

If you want to generate invoices for some specific customers, you can set customer filters by expanding the Customer Filter section on the billing schedule creation page, there are two types of filters available:

 

Simple Filter

You can search for specific customers and filter by their Bill Cycle Day based on your needs. For example, if you want to bill for customer 'Nue IO', you can search for it and only generate invoices for this customer. If you want to bill customers with the same Bill Cycle Day, you can choose the option Specific Bill Cycle Date instead of generating invoices for all customers with different bill cycle days.

 

Advanced Filter

If you have more complex criteria to find the customers you need to bill, you can switch to the advanced filter. In this filter, you can filter by any field on the customer record. For example, filtering all new business customers in the year 2023.

Product Filter

By default, a billing schedule job will bill for products with all types of revenue models. If you need to bill for specific revenue models, just check the revenue models you want to bill under the simple filter tab

You can also filter by any field on the product record under the advanced mode, only order products that matched the filter criteria will be billed.

Order Filter

Sometimes, when your customer placed an order and you want to generate an invoice immediately for this order. Or they made some changes and you only need to bill the amount for the change order. In these cases, a billing schedule can only bill for specific orders. You can either search orders from the simple filter or set the criteria in the advanced filter

Billing Job

After creating and activating a billing schedule, it will be displayed in the billing schedule list. You can see the associated billing jobs by clicking the 'View Billing Jobs' on the billing schedule record. 

 

 

The billing job will be executed at the time you configured in the billing schedule, you can check the job status to see if it is completed. The billing job has the following statutes:

• Scheduled - The current job is still waiting to be executed
• Processing - The current job is running
• Completed - The current job is completed successfully
• Completed With Error - The current job is completed with some errors
• Error - The current job has failed due to unexpected reasons
• Canceled - The current job is canceled

If a billing job has failed or is completed with errors, system administrators will receive an email notification including the error details. You can disable this email notification from Nue System Setting -> Billing -> Send email notifications when billing jobs are completed with errors or failed

After a billing job is completed successfully, you can see the number of billed customers, invoices, and credit memos(if enabled) in this billing job. When clicking on the number in the job list, you will be navigated to the related records. For example, if you click on the number in the Invoices Generated column, you will see a list of generated invoices by this billing job.

 

 

Billing Schedule Dates

When creating a billing schedule, you will need to set values for some date-type fields, and these date fields are quite important to make your billing schedule work as expected.

 

Schedule Start Date
The date that the billing schedule gets started. The default value is today's date.

 

Billing Job Date
The date when a billing job is executed. Starts from the Schedule Start Date and gets advanced each time when a new billing job is created according to the billing schedule.

 

Billing Target Date
The Billing Target Date is used to determine which billing periods of order products will be included in the current billing job. Any billing periods with a Bill Cycle Day before the Billing Target Date will be processed.

For example, let’s consider an order product with a monthly billing cycle that starts on 01/01/2023, and ends on 12/31/2023, with the 1st day of each month set as the Bill Cycle Day.

If the Billing Target Date is set to 2023/01/15, only one billing period from 01/01/2023 to 01/31/2023 will be billed. This is because the Bill Cycle Day of 01/01/2023 falls before the Billing Target Date of 01/15/2023.

However, if the Billing Target Date is set to 02/15/2023, 2 billing periods will be billed. These 2 periods span from 01/01/2023 to 02/28/2023, as both the Bill Cycle Days of 01/01/2023 and 02/01/2023 are before the Billing Target Date of 02/15/2023.

 

Invoice Date
The Invoice Date refers to the specific date when an invoice is generated or issued by a seller to a buyer. When creating a billing schedule, the Invoice Date determines the issue date of the generated invoices. In the case of a recurring billing schedule, the initial invoice date is set by the first billing job, and for subsequent billing jobs, the invoice date is updated accordingly.

For instance, let’s consider a recurring billing schedule that starts on 01/01/2023 and has an initial invoice date of 01/06/2023. In this scenario, the invoice date for the invoices generated in January would be 01/06/2023. However, when the billing job repeats on 02/01/2023, the invoice date for that particular billing period will be updated to 02/06/2023.

 

Users can change the invoice date while activating an invoice. If the invoice date is changed, the invoice's Due Date will be automatically recalculated and updated based on the payment term of the customer.