Running Bills and Viewing Bill Details
You can open the Bill Management page and view the monthly Bills for your Accounts for the current month. From there, you can open a Bill for an Account to review the Bill details:
You can reset the billing frequency and period and re-run billing for your Accounts
Select a specific Accounts to view its Bills.
If you've set up an integration with a 3rd-party system for sending outbound Bills to the system, you can 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.
Run Bills manually for a specific Bill date for your Accounts. You can run Bills either for all billing frequency or a specific frequency, such as for weekly or monthly frequency.
This topic explains how to work in the Bill Management page to view Bill details and run Bills.
Tip: Viewing and Running Bills for Specific Accounts? It's sometimes easier to go into an Account and view and runs Bills directly from the Bills tab - see Reviewing and Recalculating Bills for an Account.
Viewing Bill Details
To view Bill details:
1. Select Billing>Bill Management. The Bill Management page opens and lists the Bills for your Accounts for the default settings of the current month for Invoice Date. Details of the current Bills for each Account for this period are given, such as:
REFERENCE
EXTERNAL REFERENCE
INVOICE DATE
ACCOUNT NAME
ACCOUNT CODE
TOTAL
STATUS
LAST CALC DATE
Tip: 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 and the page will automatically refresh.
2. If you want to view the Bills for a different billing period, use the Invoice Date calendar icons to adjust the period accordingly. The Bill Management page adjusts to show Bills for the selected period.
3. 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.
4. 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:
Bill details are set out at the top with the Bill TOTAL shown for your quick reference. You can use two text hotlinks to open:
The details page of the Account the Bill is for.
The details page for the Last Completed Integration Run if you have set up an integration for sending Bills for the Account to a 3rd-party system. 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.
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.
5. Scroll down to review the remainder of the Bill:
Bill line items are grouped for charges due for Products consumed and Prepayment/Commitment fees due. You can:
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:
How the total charge breaks down into the tiered pricing bands.
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.
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 you might see on your Bills with explanations as to what these types mean 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.
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.
Warning: 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.
To run Bills manually:
1. Select Billing>Bill Management. The Bill Management page opens.
2. Select Run billing. The Run billing modal appears. 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, 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.
3. 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:
4. Select Run billing to launch the Run billing modal and set the Invoice Date you want. For this example, we've set April 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 March 2023.
Tip: Billing currency used when running Bills manually? 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 depends on what you've defined at 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 or haven't selected to override the Organization currency, then the Organization currency is used for billing the Account. For more details see Creating and Managing Currencies.
Tip: Billing frequency not showing on modal? If you've enabled Consolidate billing in your Organization configuration, the Billing frequency option is not available when you run billing manually. See the Viewing Details and Editing Configuration section in the Managing your Organization topic.
5. 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 March 2023.
Tip: Billing currency used when running Bills manually? 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 or haven't selected to override the Organization currency, then the Organization currency is used for billing the Account. For more details see Creating and Managing Currencies.
Next: Managing Bills