Balance Forward Billing(Consolidated Billing) in R12

Balance Forward Billing is just a new name of "Consolidation Invoice billing" in Release 12, which provides enhanced billing options with a more complete and flexible solution.

Oracle R12 Vanilla Features of Balance Forward Billing

If you compare with R11i Consolidated Billing Invoice, there are some enhanced feature you can see.

• A balance forward bill includes all of a customer's transactions for the billing period and any balance carried forward from the previous billing period.
• A balance forward bill can have a daily, weekly, or monthly billing period depending on the balance forward billing cycle assigned to the payment term.

Additional feature you can get like

• You can also bill on specific days of the month. This way user can not only specify the day of the month for the billing date, or even multiple days like “every 15th and last day of month”. User can also elect to bill on a specific day of the week, such as every Friday.
• You can also choose to exclude weekends, in this case if user skip weekends when determining billing dates, so billing dates only fall on workdays

• A balance forward bill is consolidated at either the customer account or site level depending on the Bill Level value at the customer profile and account profile levels. You can change the Bill Level defaulted from the customer profile class at the account profile level. The Bill Level at the site profile level is a read-only field defaulted from the account profile level.
• A balance forward bill can be either detail or summary. Both the detail and summary formats present invoice totals. The detail format lists all line items.
• You can generate a balance forward bill in either Draft or Final formats similar to R11i.
• Bill Presentment Architecture (BPA) configured formats provide a more appealing layout that can be easily modified and this can be viewed the completed bill online
• In 11i, there are five consolidated bill programs. The new feature consolidates these programs into three.

R12 : The key setup steps

The key setup steps are:

Define a Billing Cycle

This is first step for your setup. You need to navigate:

Setup:Print > Balance Forward Billing Cycles

Couple of things your quick note:

 Case 1 :If you are doing for daily, you can pick the number of days before the next bill. There is options where you can choose whether to include weekends in the number of days.

case 2 :If you doing for Weekly, you can pick the number of weeks before the next bill. Also, choose the day of the week the bill will be created. For example, you can choose bi-weekly billing that occurs every other Friday.

Case 3: If you are doing setup for monthly cycle, choose the number of months before the next bill.

By choosing Type of Day, you can elect to create the bills only on the workdays Monday through Friday. When you chose “Exclude Saturdays and Sundays”, if the billing date falls on a Saturday or Sunday, the billing date automatically changes to the date of the following Monday.

There is no way that this will exclude public Holiday's.

Define or update the Payment term and assign it the Billing Cycle

Your should do setup from this navigation

Setup : Transactions > Payment Terms

• Proxima billing/Payment terms created as in 11i is no more exist. Billing Cycle is tagged with payment term.
• in R12, billing Cycle is a new attribute of the Payment term and must be tagged to payment term to process balance forward billing.
• Payment term setup screen does not have any cutoff Date information in R12 as had in 11i, this is part billing cycle setup.
• The payment schedule dates:
  • Due Date is calculated based on the cycle and billing date therefore, the Due Date is not enterable for Balance Forward Bills
  • The Due Days field can indicate how many days after the billing date the bill is due for daily and weekly cycles
  • Day of Month and Months ahead can be used with the Monthly billing cycle. It is recommended that these only be used when a single bill day is used otherwise the due date will be the same for all the bills created during the calendar month.

 A note on Cutoff date

Cut-off Date in Payment Terms in 11i is primarily provided for consolidated billing. It is essentially used to consolidate transactions based on cut-off date. It is not expected to be used when consolidated billing feature is not used. In R12 consolidated billing feature is replaced by Balance Forward Billing and cut-off date on payment term setup is replaced with Billing Cycle.

Next ..Enable Balance Forward Billing for customers wishing consolidated bills at either the site or account level.

Follow this step: Create a Customer Profile and attach the information as created in step 1 and step 2

Customers > Profile Classes

This way you can create the step up. Next is to create Transaction which is discussed in next section.

Here , you can see there is only 3 program as compare to 5 underline program as in R11i.

You can run these processes and see the report output and verify the details agaist the booked transaction.

Oracle R12 Balance Forward Billing Vanilla Functionality

The process is then executed as follows:

• You can enter transactions or import them using auto invoice or Transaction API
• Once Transaction get booked , run the Generate Balance Forward Bill Program to create the bills as either draft or final, or set it up to run automatically.
• The generate program will kick off the print program in BPA to create either draft or final bills.

References:
http://www.oracleappshub.com/release12/r12/balance-forward-billing-in-r12/