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• Running, Viewing, and Managing Bills

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 Bills to the system, you can check the status and then review details of the last completed integration run or view all integrations runs. 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:

• Viewing Bill Details

• Filtering Bills by Status

• Reordering Columns for Bill Management

• Running Bills Manually

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

2. If you want to view the Bills for a different billing period, use the popup Invoice date (inclusive) 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 the Bill management page is the current month.

• When you open the calendar pop-ups, you can select for pre-defined periods of This month or Last month.

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 details page for the Account where you can review the Latest bills for the Account. Select the Bills tab to review all the Account's Bills.

5. To view the details of a Bill for an Account, select the Reference text hotlink. The Bill details page 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:

• 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 - in this example to Paddle - the date/time and status of the Last integration run are shown. You can use a text hotlink to open details of the last run or to View all runs. 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 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.

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 charges 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.

  • The period the Pricing has been applied to the Plan.

• For Prepayment charges line items, select the DESCRIPTION text to open the details page for the Prepayment attached to the billed Account.

• Expand Prepayment charge 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.

• 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.

• Mixed Pricing and Billing Currencies and Currency Conversions:

  • If an Account Plan pricing is in a different currency to the configured billing currency, then line items for usage charges due on the Account under that Plan will show the pricing currency for UNIT PRICE but the SUBTOTAL amount for line items will show the converted amount due in the billing currency. See Billing Currency, Pricing Currency, and Currency Conversions for more details.

  • 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.

  • For example, here's a later Bill for the same Account, but where the pricing currency has been updated to be British Pounds (GBP) and the billing currency has remained as US Dollars (USD):

Filtering Bills by Status

When you select a period for the Bills you want to load into the Bill management page, 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 (inclusive) range is set for the current month and any Bills for that period are listed.

2. If required, update the Invoice date (inclusive) 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 (inclusive) range is set for the current month and any Bills for that period are listed.

2. If required, update the Invoice date (inclusive) 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.

Working with the Run Billing Modal - Notes, Tips, and Warnings

Please review this section before running Bills manually using the Run billing modal.

Invoice Date

This is a required setting, and selection for Invoice date on the Run billing modal will depend on the specific settings of your Organization for billing frequency and billing cycle date. For common billing setups, such as for monthly billing frequency and a billing cycle date of the 1st of each month, you can use the 1st of the month following to generate a Bill for the previous month's charges.

Bill Frequency

This is an optional setting, and 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.

Target Currency

This is an optional setting, and 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.

Other Warnings and Tips

Running Bills Manually - Example

You can set up a manual billing run to suit your current needs - 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 kind of case.

To run Bills manually:

1. Select Billing>Bill management. The Bill management page opens.

2. First, update the Invoice date (inclusive) 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 October 1st 2024 and selected Monthly for Bill frequency:

In this example, we want to check for new historical usage data submitted for the Account in September 2024.

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 September 2024.

Next: Working with Bills in Bill Management

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