Subscription billing

Path: Business functionality > Sales > Subscription billing · tier official · system sales · narrative reviewed (checked by Opus)

Overview

Subscription billing lets you manage recurring invoices for services agreed by contract, with flexible pricing, renewals, and billing periods. It links quote-to-invoice workflows with deferral-based accounting and Power BI analytics. The welcome page introduces the concepts, and the examples page shows scenarios such as mid-cycle proration, upgrades and downgrades, and partial refunds and credits.

The pages fit together along the billing flow. Sales and Purchasing cover how subscription lines are sold to customers or bought from vendors and assigned to contracts. Contracts covers the customer and vendor contracts and their lifecycle. Recurring billing creates billing proposals from contract lines and next billing dates, and Posting documents explains how the resulting invoices and credit memos are posted. Billing automation adds job queue based automation. Usage-based billing and the analytics app are separate subtopics.

Start with the welcome page, then Contracts, then Recurring billing. Move to Billing automation once manual billing works.

Key points

• Welcome page lists recurring billing, billing templates, contract deferrals, usage-based billing, notice period calculations, and Power BI analytics (version 22 is mentioned).
• Recurring billing uses a Billing Proposal built from billing templates, with Billing Date, Billing to Date, Group by Contract, and Create Documents.
• Billing automation offers configurable automation levels, job queue entries, posting and document date formulas, and error logging.
• Posting documents covers contract invoices, invoice details, archived billing lines, and batch posting, using the Recurring Billing filter.
• Purchasing maps recurring vendor purchases such as rentals and maintenance to vendor subscription contracts, using the standard purchasing process.
• Contracts subtopic covers customer and vendor contracts, renewal, cancellation, price updates, and deferrals.
• Sales subtopic covers quotes and orders with subscription lines, price calculation, foreign currency, and credit memos or cancellations.
• Usage-based billing covers data exchange definitions, suppliers, subscription linking, pricing, and rebilling corrections; the Power BI app covers recurring revenue, churn, and forecasts.

Subtopics

• Subscription billing analytics (18 pages)
• Contracts (9 pages)
• Sales (4 pages)
• Bill subscriptions based on usage (10 pages)

More Learn pages

• Billing automation: Automate recurring billing up to a configured degree.
• Examples for subscription billing: The examples in this article describe some typical use cases that subscription billing features support.
• Posting documents: Learn about posted documents in subscription billing.
• Purchasing in subscription billing: Learn about purchasing in subscription billing.
• Recurring billing: You can use recurring billing in subscription billing.
• Welcome to subscription billing: Get an overview of the features available for subscription billing.

Videos, posts and code changes

Linked by a Haiku matcher with a grounding quote from the item’s summary (link/topics.ts); machine-generated.

• #10446 [Bug][Subscription Billing] “Subscription Lines - Overdue” cue counts lines of contracts that already ended (code change): “Fixed the Overdue Subscription Lines cue and page to exclude subscription lines”
• What’s New: Subscription Billing (2024 release wave 2) (video): “subscription billing; recurring invoicing; service commitments; deferrals; revenue recognition”
• Subscription Billing (video): “Subscription billing; recurring billing; revenue recognition; usage-based billing”

Business Central pages and reports

The pages, reports and queries this hub’s Learn pages name (ms.search.form, API reference), joined to the code by exact object id (data/index/docs-objects.json); a page shows the table it runs on.

• Page 8004 “Planned Service Commitments” · captioned “Planned Subscription Lines” · on Table 8002 “Planned Subscription Line”
• Page 8014 “Service Commitments List” · captioned “Subscription Lines” · on Table 8059 “Subscription Line”
• Page 8015 “Sales Service Commitments List” · captioned “Sales Subscription Lines” · on Table 8068 “Sales Subscription Line”
• Page 8053 “Customer Contracts” · captioned “Customer Subscription Contracts” · on Table 8052 “Customer Subscription Contract”
• Page 8057 “Service Commitment Packages” · captioned “Subscription Packages” · on Table 8055 “Subscription Package”
• Page 8067 “Recurring Billing” · on Table 8061 “Billing Line”
• Page 8071 “Vendor Contracts” · captioned “Vendor Subscription Contracts” · on Table 8063 “Vendor Subscription Contract”
• Page 8084 “Sub. Billing Role Center” · captioned “Subscription Billing”
• Page 314 “General Posting Setup” · on Table 252 “General Posting Setup” · via Contracts
• Page 8005 “Contract Renewal” · captioned “Subscription Contract Renewal” · on Table 8001 “Sub. Contract Renewal Line” · via Contracts
• Page 8025 “Contract Price Update” · captioned “Subscription Contract Price Update” · on Table 8004 “Sub. Contr. Price Update Line” · via Contracts
• Page 8031 “Connect Subscription To SO” · captioned “Connect Supplier Subscription to Subscription” · on Table 8016 “Usage Data Supp. Subscription” · via Bill subscriptions based on usage
• Page 8035 “Usage Data Billings” · on Table 8006 “Usage Data Billing” · via Bill subscriptions based on usage
• Page 8036 “Usage Data Blobs” · on Table 8011 “Usage Data Blob” · via Bill subscriptions based on usage
• Page 8037 “Usage Data Customers” · captioned “Usage Data Supp. Customers” · on Table 8012 “Usage Data Supp. Customer” · via Bill subscriptions based on usage
• Page 8038 “Usage Data Generic Import” · on Table 8018 “Usage Data Generic Import” · via Bill subscriptions based on usage
• Page 8041 “Usage Data Imports” · on Table 8013 “Usage Data Import” · via Bill subscriptions based on usage
• Page 8042 “Usage Data Subscriptions” · on Table 8016 “Usage Data Supp. Subscription” · via Bill subscriptions based on usage
• Page 8043 “Usage Data Supp. References” · captioned “Usage Data Supplier References” · on Table 8015 “Usage Data Supplier Reference” · via Bill subscriptions based on usage
• Page 8044 “Usage Data Suppliers” · on Table 8014 “Usage Data Supplier” · via Bill subscriptions based on usage
• Page 8052 “Customer Contract” · captioned “Customer Subscription Contract” · on Table 8052 “Customer Subscription Contract” · via Contracts
• Page 8059 “Service Objects” · captioned “Subscriptions” · on Table 8057 “Subscription Header” · via Contracts
• Page 8060 “Service Object” · captioned “Subscription” · on Table 8057 “Subscription Header” · via Contracts
• Page 8070 “Vendor Contract” · captioned “Vendor Subscription Contract” · on Table 8063 “Vendor Subscription Contract” · via Contracts
• Page 8079 “Customer Contract Deferrals” · captioned “Customer Subscription Contract Deferrals” · on Table 8066 “Cust. Sub. Contract Deferral” · via Contracts
• Page 8096 “Usage Data Billing Metadata” · on Table 8021 “Usage Data Billing Metadata” · via Bill subscriptions based on usage
• Page 36951 “PowerBI Reports Setup” · captioned “Power BI Reports Setup” · on Table 36951 “PowerBI Reports Setup” · via Subscription billing analytics

Source: Microsoft Learn (CC BY 4.0). Descriptions are Learn’s own.